🐳 Chapter 11: Installing Docker & Deploying Ghost (The Blogging Platform)

Now that your server is live, secured, and fully armed with an SSL certificate... let’s put it to good use! 🎯

We’ll deploy Ghost — a sleek, fast, and open-source blogging platform. Perfect for personal sites, portfolios, or content projects.

📦 Step 1: Install Docker & Docker Compose

🧱 Update your system and install Docker:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

👤 Optional: Create a Dedicated Docker User

If you don’t want to run everything as root or your main user, you can create a dedicated user for Docker tasks. This improves security and organization, especially in team or production environments 🔐

# Create a new user
sudo adduser dockeruser

# (Optional, usually already exists)
sudo groupadd docker

# Add user to Docker and sudo groups
sudo usermod -aG docker dockeruser
sudo usermod -aG sudo dockeruser

# Confirm group membership
groups dockeruser

🔐 1.5 – Grant Passwordless Sudo Access

To make Docker and sudo commands smoother (especially in scripts), we can give the user passwordless sudo access:

sudo visudo

Add the following line at the end of the file:

dockeruser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Then save and exit:

• Press Ctrl + O to save
• Press Enter to confirm
• Press Ctrl + X to exit

📂 1.6 – Create Volume Directory for Docker (as root)

Let’s now prepare the directory where Docker containers (like Ghost) will store their persistent data.

👤 These commands must be run as root (or with sudo)

📁 Create the volume directory:

mkdir /vw-data
chown dockeruser:docker /vw-data

✅ This gives the dockeruser permission to use the volume in your container setup.

👤 1.7 – Switch to the dockeruser and Install Docker

Now that the user and permissions are set up, let’s log in as the Docker user and install the required packages from there — keeping things clean and secure 🧼

🔄 Switch to the user:

su - dockeruser

📦 Install Docker & Docker Compose:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install docker.io -y
sudo apt install docker-compose -y

✅ Check the installation:

docker --version
docker-compose --version

You should see output confirming Docker and Compose versions — meaning it’s ready to go! 🐳🚀

🧠 Extra: Understanding docker.sock

The file /var/run/docker.sock is a Unix socket that allows communication between the Docker client and the Docker daemon.

If permissions aren’t correct, you might run into permission denied errors when running Docker as a non-root user.

👇 Check and fix permissions (run as root):

ls -l /var/run/docker.sock
sudo chown root:docker /var/run/docker.sock

Then make sure Docker is running and enabled:

sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl restart docker