Ghost Themes

A monorepo for Ghost official themes.

Development

You'll need Node, pnpm and Gulp installed globally. After that, from the project's root directory:

# install dependencies
pnpm install

# run development server
pnpm dev

Now you can edit files in packages/<theme-name>/assets/css/ or packages/<theme-name>/assets/js/, which will be compiled to packages/<theme-name>/assets/built/ automatically.

To run a theme locally, you need to symlink a theme to your local Ghost site.

# run a theme locally
pnpm symlink --theme <theme-name> --site /dir/to/your/ghost-site

If you're running the Ghost monorepo:

pnpm symlink --theme <theme-name> --site /dir/to/Ghost/ghost/core

Or if you're running a Ghost instance via the CLI:

pnpm symlink --theme <theme-name> --site /dir/to/ghost-instance

Restart your Ghost instance and the theme will be listed in the Design settings.

To create an installable theme zip file in packages/<theme-name>/dist/:

# create .zip file
pnpm zip --theme <theme-name>

Publishing & CI

This monorepo contains three types of packages, each with a different shipping mechanism:

Themes (e.g. packages/taste/, packages/dawn/, ...)

Each theme has its own CI workflow (.github/workflows/<theme>.yml). On push to main, the workflow runs tests, deploys the theme to its Ghost demo site via action-deploy-theme, and pushes to its standalone subtree repo (e.g. TryGhost/Taste). Themes are marked "private": true and are not published to npm.

@tryghost/shared-theme-assets (packages/_shared/)

Shared CSS, JS, and Handlebars partials used by all themes. Published to npm so themes can pin a version via devDependencies.

• Version bumps happen via pnpm ship:shared, which runs npm version patch on _shared. For minor or major bumps, run npm --prefix packages/_shared version minor (or major) instead.
• On push to main, CI (.github/workflows/shared-theme-assets.yml) compares the local version against what's on npm. If the version is newer, it publishes to npm with provenance. If the version hasn't changed, CI skips publishing.
• Renovate will later open PRs to bump the @tryghost/shared-theme-assets devDep in each theme.

@tryghost/theme-translations (packages/theme-translations/)

Translation files for all themes. Published to npm.

• Version bumps are automatic. On every push to main that touches packages/theme-translations/, CI (.github/workflows/theme-translations.yml) runs npm version patch, publishes to npm, and commits the version bump back to the repo.
• See packages/theme-translations/README.md for how to edit or contribute translations.

Local commands

pnpm dev            # run development server with live reload
pnpm build          # build all themes
pnpm ship:shared    # bump _shared version (patch)
pnpm test           # run tests locally
pnpm zip --theme <name>  # create an installable .zip for a theme

Copyright & License

Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license.