Ghost Helm Chart

This Helm chart deploys Ghost CMS (version 6) with ActivityPub support and a MySQL database on Kubernetes.

Features

• Modern Ghost 6 deployment with persistent storage
• ActivityPub federation support for social publishing
• MySQL database with initialization scripts and multiple database support
• Kubernetes Secrets for sensitive data
• Configurable ingress with ActivityPub routing

This helm chart was created with Kompose and heavily edited with help from Claude. This is not a recommended deployment method from Ghost, but I have my own k8 cloud hosted locally and I wanted the automatic let's encrypt support I get through an nginx ingress. This deployment is working great so far for me for a couple of sites, and I hope it provides a good starting point for someone else as well.

Installation

# Install with custom values
helm install my-ghost ./ghost-helm -f custom-values.yaml

# Upgrade deployment
helm upgrade my-ghost ./ghost-helm -f custom-values.yml

Configuration

Secrets

The chart stores sensitive data in Kubernetes Secrets:

• Database passwords (root and user)
• Mail authentication credentials

Values Configuration

Key configuration options in values.yaml:

# Ghost configuration
ghost:
    domain: "your-domain.com"
    adminUrl: "https://admin.your-domain.com"
    url: "https://your-domain.com"

# ActivityPub configuration
activitypub:
    enabled: true
    version: "1.1"
    port: 8080
    allowPrivateAddress: true

# Database configuration
database:
    name: "ghost"
    user: "ghost"
    multipleDatabases: "activitypub" # Additional database for ActivityPub

# Secrets (store securely)
secrets:
    database:
        password: "your-db-password"
        rootPassword: "your-root-password"
    mail:
        auth:
            user: "your-smtp-user"
            password: "your-smtp-password"

Services Deployed

This chart deploys the following Kubernetes services:

• Ghost CMS (port 2368) - Main Ghost application
• ActivityPub (port 8080) - Federation service (when enabled)
• MySQL Database (port 3306) - Database backend

It does not currently deploy any of the tinybird analytics.

Persistent Storage

The chart creates PersistentVolumeClaims for:

• Ghost content data (20Gi by default) - shared between Ghost and ActivityPub - This needs to be ReadWriteMany due to the way Ghost has built the services
• MySQL data (8Gi by default)

Storage sizes can be configured in values.yaml.

Mail Configuration

Configure SMTP settings in the secrets.mail section of values.yaml for Ghost to send emails.

Ingress and Routing

The chart includes an ingress configuration that handles both Ghost and ActivityPub routing:

• Ghost content is served from the root path (/)
• ActivityPub federation endpoints are automatically routed:
  • /.ghost/activitypub/* - ActivityPub API endpoints
  • /.well-known/webfinger - WebFinger discovery
  • /.well-known/nodeinfo - NodeInfo protocol

The ingress supports both the main domain and admin domain with proper SSL termination.

Customization

You can customize the deployment by modifying values.yaml or creating your own values file with overrides.