Installing Ghost on IPv6-only server

April 17 2024

In general, the Ghost official installation guides are pretty good. Here are the key changes to make it work on an IPv6-only server:

  1. Instead of creating an A record pointing your domain to the server’s IPv4 address, create an AAAA record pointing to your server’s IPv6 address.
  2. ghost install requires accessing several github.com endpoints, which do not support IPv6 yet. GitHub is working on it. Until GitHub officially supports IPv6, here’s the workaround: add the following entry to /etc/hosts on the sever before running ghost install :

    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::2 github.com
    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::3 api.github.com
    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::4 codeload.github.com
    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::5 objects.githubusercontent.com
    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::6 ghcr.io
    2a01:4f8:c010:d56::7 pkg.github.com npm.pkg.github.com maven.pkg.github.com nuget.pkg.github.com rubygems.pkg.github.com

    The IPv6 proxy server is provided by Daniel Winzen 🙏!

  3. ghost setup ssl will fail. Instead, follow the Certbot guide to provision and auto-renew SSL certificate. Note: nginx on Ubuntu 20 combo does not work on IPv6 because the snap store APIs do not support IPv6.