Using Buster – A Static Site Generator for Ghost

Buster is a static site generator for Ghost made by Akshit Khurana. It is used to generate static HTML + CSS from your local Ghost install, this is perfect for using Ghost on shared hosting (no need for Node.js!).

In this short tutorial I’ll be going through the steps on how to install and use Buster. I used a mac to install Buster, but the steps should be fairly similar on Linux or Windows since the install process + usage is done though the command line.

Requirements

• Ghost installed locally on your computer
• Python
• Terminal

Install pip

Buster is written in Python. In order to install Buster, you will need pip which is a Python package manager. Follow their official install guide to get pip installed on your computer.

Check if your computer has pip installed by running this command in the terminal:

pip --version

Install Homebrew

Buster requires wget, this can be installed through Homebrew which is a package manager for Mac. Follow their official install guide to get Homebrew on your computer.

Check if your computer has Homebrew installed by running this command in the terminal:

brew --version

Install Buster

Once pip and Homebrew are both installed, you can install Buster on your computer.

Just run the following commands in the terminal:

pip install buster brew install wget

To make sure you have successfully installed buster, you can run this command in the terminal:

buster --version

Using Buster

1. At first you’ll need to setup Buster, run this command in the terminal:

buster setup

2. Buster will then ask for you to “Enter the Github repository URL:”. You’ll need to have an empty GitHub repo at hand. Enter the url and be sure to change the username to your GitHub username and repo to your repo name:

https://github.com/yourgithubusername/repo.git

3. Now you can generate the static files:

buster generate --domain=http://127.0.0.1:2368

If you are using a different domain or port for local Ghost install, you should alter the command above.

5. With the preview command you can preview the generated output on your Mac’s default browser.

buster preview

6. Finally you can deploy the static files to the GitHub repo:

buster deploy

From here on, you can host the generated static files on GitHub Pages or upload the generated static files to your shared hosting.