Migrate Ghost API

Export content from an existing Ghost installation using the Admin API, and generate a zip file you can import into a Ghost installation.

Posts are fetched in their native Lexical format and stored in a mg-context SQLite database (cached in the migration's tmp dir). The exporter writes chunked posts.json / posts-N.json files via MigrateContext.writeGhostJson so very large sites stay within Ghost's import file size limits. Re-running the same command is idempotent — posts are deduplicated by their Ghost ID via mg-context's lookupKey.

Install

To install the CLI, which is required for the Usage commands below:

npm install --global @tryghost/migrate

To use this package in your own project:

npm install @tryghost/mg-ghost-api --save

or

pnpm add @tryghost/mg-ghost-api

Usage

To run a Ghost API migration, the required command is:

migrate ghost --url https://example.com --apikey 1234abcd

It's possible to pass more options, in order to achieve a better migration file for Ghost:

• --url (required)
  • Ghost API URL
  • string - default: null
• --apikey (required)
  • Ghost API key
  • string - default: null
• -V --verbose
  • bool - default: false
  • Show verbose output
• --zip
  • bool - default: true
  • Create a zip file
• -s --scrape
  • Configure scraping tasks
  • string - default: all
  • Choices: all, assets, none
    • all: Scrape web metadata and download assets
    • assets: Only download assets (images, media, files)
    • none: Skip all scraping tasks
• -I --info
  • bool - default: false
  • Show initalisation info only
• -b --batch
  • number - default: 0
  • Batch number to run (defaults to running all)
• -l --limit
  • number - default: 15
  • Number of items fetched per Ghost Admin API request (fetch batch size)
• --postsPerFile
  • number - default: 2000
  • Maximum posts written per output JSON file. Larger sites are split into posts-1.json, posts-2.json, etc. to keep files at manageable sizes
• --posts
  • bool - default: true
  • Import posts (set to false to skip)
• --postFilter
  • string - default: null
  • A string of post filters, as defined in the Ghost Admin API
• --pages
  • bool - default: true
  • Import pages (set to false to skip)
• --pageFilter
  • string - default: null
  • A string of page filters, as defined in the Ghost Admin API
• --cache
  • Persist local cache (including the mg-context SQLite DB) after migration is complete (Only if --zip is true)
  • bool - default: true
• --tmpPath
  • string - default: null
  • Full path where temporary files (cache + mg-context DB) are stored. Defaults to a hidden tmp dir
• --outputPath
  • string - default: null
  • Full path where the final zip file is written. Defaults to CWD
• --cacheName
  • string - default: null
  • Unique name for the cache directory. Defaults to a UUID derived from the URL

A more complex migration command could look like this:

migrate ghost --url https://example.com --apikey 1234abcd --batch 5 --limit 10 --postFilter 'tag:[news, press]' --pages false --verbose

This will get the first 50 posts with the tag news or press, in 5 batches of 10 posts, exclude pages, and show all available output in the console.

For very large sites, tune --postsPerFile to control how the output is chunked:

migrate ghost --url https://example.com --apikey 1234abcd --postsPerFile 1000

See the Filter documentation for more info.

Develop

This is a mono repository, managed with Nx and pnpm workspaces.

Follow the instructions for the top-level repo.

1. git clone this repo & cd into it as usual
2. Run pnpm install to install top-level dependencies.

Run

To run a local development copy, cd into this directory, and replace migrate with pnpm dev, like so:

pnpm dev ghost --url https://example.com --apikey 1234abcd

Test

• pnpm lint run just eslint
• pnpm test run lint and tests

Copyright & License

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