Apps Getting Started for Ghost Devs

This guide is a description of a set of APIs and tools which are constantly changing so that Ghost devs can get stuck in with building the App Platform. This is not intended as a guide for App developers. We may scrap the whole lot and start again at any moment 😉

Ghost Apps are created by extending the Ghost-App boilerplate.

Create a new folder in your content/apps folder, for now the folder name is your app name. Permitted characters: a-z, 0-9, _, -.

Inside the folder, create a package.json and an index.js file.

package.json should include:

"dependencies": {
 "ghost-app": "~0.0.1",
}

index.js should look like:

var App = require('ghost-app').App,
 MyApp;
MyApp = App.extend({
 install: function () {},
 uninstall: function () {},
 activate: function () {},
 deactivate: function () {}
});
module.exports = MyApp;

The proxy object is available inside any lifecycle function as this.app for example you could do the following in the activate method and see the title 'Welcome to Ghost' output on startup.

this.app.api.posts.read(1).then(function (post) {
 console.log(post.title);
});

Open up your database, and add the name of your app to activeApps in the settings table.

For example, if your app's folder name is example-app, the value of activeApps should be ["example-apps"]. Double quotes are required.

Once added, restart Ghost and your app will be installed & loaded.

var App = require('ghost-app').App

^ the .App will be gone as soon as I publish the next version to npm