SpookyEngine

Quickly drop a Ghost blog into a Rails app. Uses the Spooky gem (hence the name) to connect to Ghost's API.

Have access to your blog at /blog or wherever you want it. No assumptions. It can use use your layouts and styles with minimal configuration. All views can be quickly overridden by providing your own templates.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

# Need our fork of spooky for now. 
gem "spooky", git: "https://github.com/collectiveidea/spooky", branch: "active_model" 
gem "spooky-engine"

Usage

Add this to your routes.rb and change the at: path as you desire:

mount Spooky::Engine, at: "/blog", as: "blog"

Set ENV vars for Spooky to connect to your Ghost instance:

GHOST_API_URL="https://blog.yourdomain.com"
GHOST_CONTENT_API_KEY="abc123"

Optionally configure (mainly for the Atom feed right now). Add this in an initializer:

Rails.application.config.spooky_engine.config do |config|
  config.title = "My Amazing Blog"
  config.subtitle = "This is some cool stuff you should read."
  config.rights = "© 2025 Me. All rights reserved."
  config.icon =  "icon.png" # gets passed to asset_url()
  config.logo =  "logo.png" # gets passed to asset_url()
end

Customizing

The provided views are intentionally simplistic. You can style them however you want, or replace all or some of them entirely.

Put your own views in app/views/spooky/* and they'll take priority. To link to any blog-related resources, make sure you prefix with spooky_engine.. Example: spooky_engine.page_path("about")

Customize layout

The layout is the one thing you'll probalby want to change.

Either way, make sure to add the link to the Atom feed in your <head>

<%= auto_discovery_link_tag :atom, spooky_engine.atom_path %>

Option 1: New Layout

Add a new layout in app/views/layouts/spooky/application.html.erb and it will work.

Option 2: Use an existing layout.

Add this to an initializer:

Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
  # Use your application layout, or any you prefer.
  Spooky::ApplicationController.layout "application"
end

Routes

Routes exist for Posts, Pages, Authors and Tags. We use slug instead everywhere, so you get nice URLs, like /pages/about.

Webhooks

Receive Ghost's webhooks easily. Point them at /blog/webhooks (assuming you mounted the engine at /blog) and then you can subscribe via ActiveSupport::Notifications:

ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe('webhook.spooky') do |event|
  event.payload # webhook body
end

Version support

This was built expecting Rails 8+. It probalby works with older versions but hasn't been tested. Fork it, try it, and PRs welcome!

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.