Deploy Ghost on Oracle Cloud's free tier

At a glance

Running Ghost on Ampere ARM

Ghost's official image supports ARM64. Content and images live on the mounted volume, which the Always Free 200 GB block storage allowance covers many times over.

Steps

1. Set the url environment variable. Ghost bakes this into every generated link and email; changing it later means rewriting content URLs.
2. Configure outbound email. Newsletters need an SMTP provider — set mail__* variables to your provider's credentials.
3. Back up the content volume. It holds images, themes and settings.

Dockerfile for Ghost on ARM64

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:5-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      url: https://blog.yourdomain.com
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: db
      database__connection__user: ghost
      database__connection__password: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      database__connection__database: ghost
    volumes:
      - ghostdata:/var/lib/ghost/content
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:2368:2368"
  db:
    image: mysql:8
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ghost
      MYSQL_USER: ghost
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${DB_ROOT_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - ghostdb:/var/lib/mysql
volumes:
  ghostdata:
  ghostdb:

Need one tailored to your repository? The free Dockerfile generator writes an ARM-ready multi-stage build for you.

Common mistakes

• MySQL memory usage: MySQL 8 defaults are hungry; cap innodb_buffer_pool_size on smaller shapes.
• Missing SMTP: Member signups silently fail without a working mail configuration.
• Theme uploads lost on redeploy: Only the mounted content directory persists.

Related reading

• /guides/self-host-docker
• /tools/cloud-cost-calculator
• /oracle-cloud/always-free-arm
• All deployment guides