Ghost Desktop on Xubuntu 17.04 won't start

Jochen Kirstätter -

Already before the migration from Joomla to Ghost last weekend I run the Ghost Desktop application on Windows. Now, after the successful completion it was about time to get going on my other machines. You know, the ones away from the main rig... Usually used during the evening hours, just for fun, or experimenting.

Tonight, I decided to give one of my Linux systems some attention, started to upgrade some packages, and installed new software. Among those also Ghost Desktop App for Linux. On the Ghost website you get version 1.3.0 (as of writing), and it's a Debian package.

Knowing that the desktop app is an Electron-based application, and I already packaged a few Electron apps myself, it would run on any Ubuntu-based system, too.
Note: This post was written in Ghost Desktop running on Xubuntu 17.04 64bit

Installation of Ghost Desktop

Either you double-click on the downloaded .deb package and your system will prompt you to open/install the application in Software, or you can run the following command in the Terminal:

$ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/ghost-desktop-1.3.0-debian.deb

Ghost Desktop can then be launched via the Application Menu/Launcher under ghost-desktop or if you prefer the terminal:

$ Ghost

The problem: Ghost Desktop won't start

If you try to launch the application via the menu or any other GUI launcher you won't get any response at all. The software just isn't executed, it seems.

Compared to running it in the Terminal. This might produce the following output:

$ Ghost
A JavaScript error occurred in the main process
Uncaught Exception:
Error: Unable to find a valid app
    at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/lib/Ghost/resources/electron.asar/browser/init.js:121:9)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/lib/Ghost/resources/electron.asar/browser/init.js:173:3)
    at Module._compile (module.js:571:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:488:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:447:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:439:3)
    at Module.runMain (module.js:605:10)
    at run (bootstrap_node.js:424:7)
    at startup (bootstrap_node.js:147:9)

The solution: Set permissions

Fortunately, this has been reported already on GitHub by user letsjustfixit. The issue is caused by a missing permission bit on the Electron app. A temporary workaround has been documented until the package is going to be fixed.

Run the following chmod to set read and execute bits on the Electron app and dependent components. Then launch Ghost Desktop again.

$ sudo chmod -R +rx /usr/lib/Ghost/resources/app
$ Ghost 

 ⚡️  Welcome to Ghost  👻

Happy blogging!

It's great to see that such issues are handled on GitHub, and the "fix" is easily done.

As maintainer of own Electron-based applications I'm interested in the root cause. So far, I didn't come across a similar problem (touching wood!). Thankfully, I'm going to add this to my notes on Electron.

If you're familiar with this kind of problem regarding Electron packaging on Linux, give it try to fix it. On my side, I already cloned the Ghost-Desktop repository. Let's see whether I'm able to create a pull request for the Ghost community.