Ghost’s current recommended Node version is Node v20 LTS.

We use the recommended version of Node.js in production on Ghost(Pro), which means it’s heavily tested and the Ghost core team actively fixes issues.

Running Ghost on the latest version of Node.js is not guaranteed to work, and we can’t offer support for any issues. Ghost is a small team so we keep version support to a minimum to give us time to build new features 🏃‍♀️

Compatible versions of Node.js can be downloaded from the Node.js releases page. You can also install multiple versions of Node using nave or nvm.

Upgrade Node.js

When upgrading Node.js, you need to run the update for Node and then re-install Ghost’s dependencies. This is because Ghost has several binary dependencies that are compiled for the specific Node.js version. Without reinstalling dependencies, Ghost will fail to start with strange error messages.

To upgrade the steps are:

1. Download and import the Nodesource GPG key

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource-repo.gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/nodesource.gpg

2. Create deb repository

NODE_MAJOR=20 # Use a supported version
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/nodesource.gpg] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_$NODE_MAJOR.x nodistro main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list

3. Run update and install

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs -y

4. Run ghost version to get your current Ghost version
5. ghost update [version] --force to force Ghost to reinstall your current version of Ghost, to trigger a re-install of dependencies.

It’s not recommended to update Node and Ghost at the same time. Reinstalling the current version of Ghost ensures that Node is updated correctly first so that you can be sure that Ghost will update smoothly.

Common Errors

Script deprecation warning: Node changed its distribution method, which requires adjusting configurations in order to upgrade. Learn more.

If you attempt to install Ghost with an unsupported version of Node.js, you may encounter the error ERROR: Unsupported version of Node and/or Exit status 231. To resolve this, you must install a compatible version of Node.js.

Why follow LTS?

We encourage the community to support each other, but more often than not it falls to us to ensure our users have a good experience.

Ghost is a tiny team with ambitious plans and we need to focus on delivering a useful product. By following LTS we can focus our efforts on meaningful work and keep our time spent on node versioning to a minimum. It also allows us to delay the support impact until later and gives us a chance to grow our team to cope with the support in the meantime.

If you want to run Ghost on the latest version of Node, you can, however, we can’t offer support for any issues.

Node compatibility matrix