What is the cause of the "502 Bad Gateway" after Ghost 1.8.7 update

Question

I recently installed Ghost 1.8.4 and Nginx on my AWS ec2 Ubuntu 16.04 server. When I loaded my blog site, it correctly took me to the Ghost home page, from where I logged into Ghost admin. On the admin screen, there was a message to update.

I ran ghost update in putty

The update appeared to be successful, but when I returned to my blog site, I received the following error:

502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu)

1. Does anyone know a probably cause of this error and how to resolve?
2. I checked some posts, which suggested I should have turned Ghost off before the update. If this is true, is my ghost installation now corrupted?

3. I went to my ghost directory in /var/www/ghost and tried to run:

   sudo service ghost start

   but it returned:

   Failed to start ghost.service: Unit ghost.service not found

   and trying to stop, returns Unit ghost.service not loaded. Am I running the command from the correct location?

Messuage

any output for which ghost? – Silken

@TarunLalwani, Ghost CMS ghost.org installed via CLI – Messuage

No, I mean executing the command from terminal which ghost and ghost start what does that give you? – Silken

@TarunLalwani, which ghost returns /usr/bin/ghost and when i go to var/www/ghost and run ghost start i get: ✖ Starting Ghost An error occurred. Message: 'EACCES: permission denied, open '/var/www/ghost/.ghost-cli'' Debug Information: Node Version: v6.11.3 Ghost-CLI Version: 1.1.1 Environment: production Command: 'ghost start' Additional log info available in: /home/ubuntu/.ghost/logs/ghost-cli-debug-2017-09-23T04_00_01_360Z.log Please refer to https://docs.ghost.org/docs/v1/troubleshooting#section-cli-errors for troubleshooting. – Messuage

Did you try sudo ghost start – Silken

I did try that @TarunLalwani. It seems that somehow the error has resolved itself. Unfortunately I don't know how. Thank you for the help. – Messuage

Answer 1

I've experienced 502 issues with ghost behind nginx several times over a few years of running it. I'm not sure if the cause of mine today is the same as yours, but what I observed was that after a restart ghost had changed its port number to one different than what its nginx config was listening on.

I followed these directions from https://web.archive.org/web/20200807095031/https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean-vps/ which resolved it for me:

See which port ghost is running on:

sudo netstat -plotn

Check that it matches the proxy_pass in the nginx config file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled.

In my case the port in the nginx config had incremented to 2369 while the actual node process was running on 2368. Changing the proxy_pass port back to 2368 in my ghost blog's nginx config file resolved the issue for me.

Poul

This is what solved the problem for me after upgrading to Ghost 2.6.0. The Nginx config had port 2368 while Ghost was running on 2369. – Ghiselin

Same here, after upgrading to Ghost 2.18.1. Same pair of ports, even (2368, but now 2369). – Informality

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem after upgrading ghost.

Make sure the port number configured in your ghost's config file and the proxy_pass in your ghost site's nginx configuration files match.

Check the port number in /var/www/ghost/config.production.json matches the proxy_pass port in the nginx config files.

/var/www/ghost/system/files/<yourDomainName>.<extension>.conf
/var/www/ghost/system/files/<yourDomainName>.<extension>-ssl.conf

In my case I had to change 2368 to 2369 in the nginx config files to fix the issue.

Make sure you restart your ghost and nginx after you make the changes.

# restart your ghost site
cd /var/www/ghost/
ghost restart 
# restart nginx
sudo systemctl restart nginx

Hope this helps someone.

Bendick

Answer 3

Apparently when I posted this issue it was due to a bug in the Ghost CLI that the ghost team were in the process of fixing.

They provided me with these instructions to run on my server:

systemctl stop ghost_www-blogwebsite-com
ghost update --force

The resulting output:

stopping Ghost [skipped]
Removing old Ghost versions [skipped]

This fixed the problem and updated to the correct version.

Messuage