Question

Ghost blog hosted on Ghost droplet has bug in Ghost admin general settings to "Make this site private" button

The Ghost Admin page has an option on the bottom of the general settings to “Make this site private”. It is not working in the ghost droplet.

When toggled to opt for a private site with the suggested password and saved in the admin page it does make the site private, but the password will not work and you cannot get past the authentication page. I tried to change the password and was sure to save my changes, but to no avail. This is a problem on two separate launched ghost droplets.

Please advise…


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 4, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

Indeed this seems to be the case. As far as I can see this has already been reported to Ghost via a GitHub issue:

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/12173

I’ve tested the fix suggested by Antucg and it seems to be working:

  • Edit the following file:
nano +48 /var/www/ghost/current/core/frontend/apps/private-blogging/lib/middleware.js

The code section should look like this:

return session({
  maxAge: constants.ONE_MONTH_MS,
  signed: false,
  sameSite: "none",
})(req, res, next);

Comment out the sameSite: "none" bit so that the code snippet looks like this:

return session({
  maxAge: constants.ONE_MONTH_MS,
  signed: false,
//  sameSite: "none",
})(req, res, next);
  • Switch to the ghost-mgr user:
su ghost-mgr

And restart ghost:

ghost restart

After that, the login will work as normal.

For a permanent fix, I would recommend keeping an eye on the GitHub issue. Regards, Bobby

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