Updating Ghost Blog at 30,000ft
I was recently on a Virgin flight home, and our flight got put into a holding pattern over Sydney due to weather. The captain informed us that our updated landing time was now pushed out by an hour.
By this time, I had finished watching the movie that I had started so cracked open the laptop to give Virgin domestic WiFi a go. It has been a while since I have tested it so was interested to see how it went.
A quick speed test on my phone showed that the connection was reasonable considering I was on a plane. I am not quite sure why I had the idea, it was probably just my inner geek coming out, but I suddenly had the urge to do some maintenance on the blog and finally upgrade Ghost from version 1 to version 2!
I am sure part of me just wanted to see if I could do it on a plane without causing any downtime for the site. So I busted out the laptop and got to work.
For any technical people that read this blog, I host Ghost in docker, so I knew updating was going to be pretty straightforward. It was just a matter of taking a backup, updating my docker-compose.yml file, pulling the new docker image, then merging my theme mods back into the newer version of the Casper theme. The real test in all of that was if SSH was going to be usable with the ~700ms of latency. Surprisingly it wasn't too bad, typing in the console was a little laggy but it was manageable.
After about 15mins, the process was done, and Ghost is now running version 2.30.2! For those that haven't heard of Ghost, it is a great alternative to WordPress for a blogging platform.
John O’Nolan
What a great world we live in where even flying through the sky at 700km/h in a tin can you can get access to the internet at a reasonable speed :)