Upgrading Ghost v5 to v6

Claire Furney

• 2 min read
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Docs: https://docs.ghost.org/update

It’s that time again when I need to update ghost. Yet again, I am a major version down and yet again the version of node I have installed is not sufficient.

How it goes tiddly pom

I checked on the admin interface and there was an update, then had a look at some previous notes.

  1. sudo npm -i -g ghost-cli@latest (from previous instructions)
  2. Ton of warnings about unsupported node version
  3. grep for how I installed node, can’t find anything in the bash history
  4. Get a link to the previous instructions on wayback machine. Seems I must have done it this way because all the infrastructure exists. Apparently I used these instructions: https://web.archive.org/web/20250525031016/https://ghost.org/docs/install/ubuntu/

The node source is set to version 18 and I now need version 22 (very specific, no other versions are supported).

  1. sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list and update from 18.* to 22.*
  2. sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  3. node -v is now 22
  4. ghost check-update - shows major version available
  5. ghost doctor - all ok
  6. ghost backup - kept failing to find my most recent password, got there in the end

Annoyingly there are literally no instructions online about how to upgrade from any v5 to latest v6. I have to do ghost update and then get told by the prompt.

  1. ghost update - read prompt which isn't going to allow me to do this but finally has the instructions
  2. ghost update v5 - success, now writing this to check all ok
  3. ghost backup

The more it goes

Oh my gosh, previously I was asked for my admin username and password which threw me a bit being asked to type it into a CLI, but now I am being asked for a "Ghost Staff access token". Is this some kind of left over token I shouldn't be seeing in some internal build?

On snowing

  1. ghost update
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And we're there.

or are we...