Sending email

A working email configuration is required to send newsletters and account emails for new users. There are two kinds of emails and corresponding settings:

Bulk emails

Those are used for sending newsletters. Currently only Mailgun is supported. To set up bulk emails, simply add your Mailgun (sub)domain and private API key or a domain’s Sending API key in Settings > Newsletter. More here.

Transactional emails

Used to e.g. send a welcome email or reset a user’s password. You can use any SMTP service for this. Since we need Mailgun for bulk emails anyway, here the steps for using Mailgun:

  1. Log into your Mailgun control panel
  2. Find the domain’s SMTP Credentials tab, as described here
  3. Add a new SMTP user. The password will be shown in a grey box at the bottom-right
  4. Go back to PikaPods and open the pods settings (or add those settings in the config file via SFTP)
  5. Under Env Vars fill in the below details as shown here
    • mail__transport: SMTP
    • mail__from: noreply@EXAMPLE.COM
    • mail__options__service: Mailgun
    • mail__options__host: smtp.mailgun.org or smtp.eu.mailgun.org (for US or EU server location, as shown in SMTP Settings on Mailgun)
    • mail__options__port: 587
    • mail__options__secure: false (or true when using port 465)
    • mail__options__auth__user: postmaster@mg.EXAMPLE.com (Or any other user you added in Mailgun. Be sure that the supplied user can send using the address given in mail__from.)
    • mail__options__auth__pass: The password shown in the grey box on Mailgun
  6. Now you should be able to send transactional emails. If you still get an error, check the pod’s logs in PikaPods’s control panel. It will show the detailed error.

Editing config.json

The upstream image currently doesn’t support editing or persisting configuration files. All configuration is done via env vars. We already support many different Ghost options. If you need more added, please get in touch.

Customizing robots.txt

To customize the robots.txt file for your Ghost site:

  1. Download your current theme from the Ghost admin panel
  2. Add your custom robots.txt file to the root directory of your theme (e.g., themes/your-theme/robots.txt)
  3. Upload the modified theme back through Settings > Design > Change Theme
  4. Verify the changes by visiting yourdomain.com/robots.txt

Example robots.txt content:

User-agent: *

Casper theme missing

When using the default Casper theme, in rare cases the site may look broken after a pod restart. This is due to a known issue with Docker adding a broken symlink. If you experience this issue, go to Settings > Design > Change Theme and reinstall the desired theme.

You can also upload and customize your own theme via SFTP.