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

Posted on October 7, 2016

Hi,

Ubuntu 16 showed me that there was some update, so I updated it. Now whenever I am trying to start the Ghost service I get “Failed to start ghost.service: Unit ghost.service not found.”

But when I go to Ghost folder and “npm start --production” it, it works.

Any idea how to get the “sudo service ghost start” working?

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heffebaycay

October 16, 2016

I encountered the same problem after upgrading my droplet to Ubuntu 16. I solved it by adding a systemd service configuration for ghost.

I created the following file: /lib/systemd/system/ghost.service

With this content

[Unit]
Description=Ghost: Just a blogging platform
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/ghost
User=ghost
Group=ghost
ExecStart=/usr/bin/npm start --production
ExecStop=/usr/bin/npm stop --production
Restart=always
SyslogIdentifier=Ghost

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This is based on the following systemd script: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-Config/blob/master/systemd/ghost.service