-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 68
Import format
Ghost imports from existing blogs by having them export a JSON file and then reading that in.
- WordPress users can use the Ghost WordPress Plugin to export their data.
- WordPress users can also use the wp2ghost command-line tool to convert their WordPress export files to Ghost-compatible JSON.
- Jekyll users can use the Jekyll to Ghost Plugin
- Blogger users can try blogger2ghost. Also available as a web service.
- Open-source geeks may consider importing READMEs from all of their Github repositories as regular posts using gh2ost tool.
- Tumblr users can use Tumblr to Ghost
Once you've generated the JSON go to /ghost/debug on your blog to access the import form.
If no export tools exist for your current blogging system you'll need to create one that generates a JSON file as described here. There is a full example at the end of this file. Please note that your final JSON file should have no comments in the final format. Those are only included here for readability and explanatory purposes.
First and foremost, your JSON file must contain valid JSON. You can test your file is valid using the JSONLint online tool.
The file structure can optionally be wrapped in {"db":[...contents here...]} - both with and without are valid Ghost JSON files.
You must include a meta block and a data block.
IDs inside the file are usually relative to the file only, so if you have a post with id: 1 and a posts_tags object which references post_id: 1, then those two things will be linked, but they do not relate to the post with id: 1 in your database.
"meta":{"exported_on":1408552443891,"version":"003"}
The meta block expects two keys, exported_on and version. exported_on should be an epoch timestamp in milliseconds, version should be the data version the import is valid for. Currently Ghost is on data version 003, see version info for more details.
"data": { "posts": [{...}, ...], "tags": [], "posts_tags": [], "users": [], "roles_users": []}
The data block contains all of the posts, tags, and users that you want to import into your blog, as well as relationships between posts and tags and users and roles. Each item that you include should be an array of objects.
With 0.5 comes the ability to import multiple users into your blog. Any user in the file who has an email address which matches the email address of a user already in your database will be ignored. Any user with a new email address will be imported and their account set to locked so that they must reset their password to login.
If you want to link your posts, tags, etc to the user they were authored/created/published by you can do so by specifying a user id relative to a user's id in the import file. So, if you have a user with id: 2 in your file, and a post with author_id: 2 that post will be set to be authored by that user.
All new users (i.e. users with email addresses that aren't yet present in the db) are imported first. Then the importer matches the ids from created_by, author_id etc with users in the users: [] object, and finally maps them to the right user in the database via their email address. Therefore if you want to link objects to a user that is already in the database you can specify the bare minimum information for that user so that it can be mapped correctly:
"users": [{
id: 3,
name: "A User",
email: "user@example.com"
}]
Note: there is a special case for user ids. Any reference to a user with id: 1, i.e. created_by: 1 or author_id: 1 where there is no user with that id in the import file, will be assumed to refer to the user who has the owner role.
All users are given the role of author by default. If you want to specify different roles, you can do so by providing a roles_users object, much like the posts_tags object. Please note that Ghost doesn't yet support importing roles, so in this case the role_id is always relative to the id in the database, rather than in the file. This will change to match the other objects in the near future.
{
"meta":{
// epoch time in milliseconds
"exported_on": 1388805572000,
// Data version, current is 003
"version": "003"
},
"data":{
"posts": [
{
"id":5,
"title": "my blog post title",
"slug": "my-blog-post-title",
"markdown": "the *markdown* formatted post body",
"html": "the <i>html</i> formatted post body",
"image": null,
"featured": 0, // boolean indicating featured status
"page": 0, // boolean indicating if this is a page or post
"status": "published", // or draft
"language": "en_US",
"meta_title": null,
"meta_description":null,
"author_id": 1, // the first user created has an id of 1
"created_at": 1283780649000, // epoch time in millis
"created_by": 1, // the first user created has an id of 1
"updated_at": 1286958624000, // epoch time in millis
"updated_by": 1, // the first user created has an id of 1
"published_at": 1283780649000, // epoch time in millis
"published_by": 1 // the first user created has an id of 1
}
],
"tags": [
{
"id": 3,
"name": "Colorado Ho!",
"slug": "colorado-ho",
"description": ""
},
{
"id": 4,
"name": "blue",
"slug": "blue",
"description": ""
}
],
"posts_tags": [
{"tag_id":3, "post_id":5},
{"tag_id":3, "post_id":2},
{"tag_id":4, "post_id":24}
],
"users": [
{
"id": 2,
"name": "user's name",
"slug": "users-name",
"email": "user@example.com",
"image": null,
"cover": null,
"bio": null,
"website": null,
"location": null,
"accessibility": null,
"status": "active",
"language": "en_US",
"meta_title": null,
"meta_description": null,
"last_login": null,
"created_at": 1283780649000, // epoch time in millis
"created_by": 1, // the first user created has an id of 1
"updated_at": 1286958624000, // epoch time in millis
"updated_by": 1 // the first user created has an id of 1
}
],
"roles_users": [
{
"user_id": 2,
"role_id": 3
}
]
}
}