Setting up Ghost to run from a subdomain

When I first set up my Ghost blog I decided to host it at the apex domain level darrenxu.com. This was a good place to start but I decided having a blog as my default landing page wasn’t what I was after. Instead I wanted to have my portfolio in the ‘home’ page and the blog part of a subdomain off that domain.

When I set up Ghost I had set the url in the config to be https://darrenxu.com. I followed these instructions on changing my url.

ssh into ghost
sudo -i -u ghost-mgr
cd /var/www/ghost
ghost config url {enterURL}
ghost setup nginx
ghost setup ssl
ghost restart

Next I needed to point my apex domain to where my portfolio was hosted on Netlify. I configured the nginx file (/etc/nginx/sites-available/darrenxu.com-ssl.conf) to change where darrenxu.com pointed to.

#proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
proxy_pass https://darren-xu.netlify.app;

Luckily the droplet had SSL all configured so it worked like a charm out of the box. Finally I added the A records to my DNS provider to point both darrenxu.com and *.darrenxu.com to the IP address of the droplet and everything was working as expected.