Error message when installing Ghost on a non-empty directory is unclear

[elainewlin]

My colleague has a blog repository, some-blog. some-blog is an existing, published blog that uses ghost and the default Casper theme. I am trying to contribute to some-blog for the first time. However, I found it a bit confusing to set up ghost.

Within the existing directory, some-blog, I tried running ghost install local. Understandably, this doesn't work because the directory is not empty. I saw the error message:

A SystemError occurred.
Message: Current directory is not empty, Ghost cannot be installed here.

I found it unclear how to resolve this error. As a suggestion, perhaps rephrase the error to something like 'Message: The current directory is not empty. If you have an existing ghost blog, please run ghost install --check-empty false, and check the config.development.json file. That way, there's a bit more guidance for folks trying to set up an existing ghost blog.

[acburdine]

@elainewlin you're definitely right - that error message can be made more clear.

That said - when you say you have an existing blog that you're trying to set up, what exactly are you trying to do? ghost install is intended to set up a new blog from scratch, if you already have it installed then installing it again would potentially delete existing data which is why the empty directory check exists. Are you trying to update the existing blog to a newer ghost version?

[vikaspotluri123]

refs TryGhost/Ghost#21964

[elainewlin]

@acburdine Hi! Thanks for the response. I am not trying to update the ghost version. For the existing blog, I am trying to make changes to the blog i.e. adding a new blog post, editing the blog CSS, etc. I found it somewhat confusing / unintuitive to set up my local environment. As @vikaspotluri123 pointed out, I also wrote some more context in TryGhost/Ghost#21964.