How to Work Around ghost update pnpm Failures on FreeBSD

If you have tried updating Ghost recently using ghost update, you likely ran into this brick wall:

Downloading the pnpm binary for freebsd-x64...
Could not download the pnpm binary: Sorry! pnpm does not provide a pre-built binary for freebsd.

Because Ghost-CLI relies heavily on Corepack and pnpm to fetch dependencies, updates halt immediately on FreeBSD. Newer versions of pnpm insist on fetching pre-compiled native binaries that do not exist for BSD architectures. Furthermore, forcing a standard npm install triggers dependency resolution crashes (ERESOLVE) due to peer conflicts between knex and bookshelf.

Here is how to solve this issue permanently using two lightweight wrapper scripts.
Step 1: Intercept Corepack
First, back up your original corepack binary and replace it with a shell wrapper. This prevents Corepack from attempting to fetch non-existent FreeBSD binaries when invoked by Ghost-CLI.

COREPACK_BIN=$(which corepack)
mv "$COREPACK_BIN" "${COREPACK_BIN}.real"
cat << 'EOF' > "$COREPACK_BIN"
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "pnpm" ]; then
  echo "Bypassing pnpm for FreeBSD: running npm install..."
  exec npm install --omit=dev --ignore-scripts --legacy-peer-deps
fi
exec /usr/local/bin/corepack.real "$@"
EOF
chmod +x "$COREPACK_BIN"

Step 2: Mock pnpm and Reroute to npm
Ghost-CLI checks pnpm -v directly before initiating an update. To satisfy Ghost-CLI's checks while avoiding binary downloads, preserve your original pnpm executable and create a shim in /usr/local/bin/pnpm.

mv /usr/local/bin/pnpm /usr/local/bin/pnpm.orig
cat << 'EOF' > /usr/local/bin/pnpm
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "-v" ] || [ "$1" = "--version" ]; then
  echo "12.3.4"
  exit 0
fi
echo "Bypassing pnpm for FreeBSD: running npm install..."
exec npm install --omit=dev --ignore-scripts --legacy-peer-deps
EOF
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pnpm

How It Works

• Version Spoofing: When Ghost-CLI runs pnpm -v, the wrapper returns a valid version string (12.3.4), passing pre-flight system checks.
  
• Rerouted Installation: When Ghost executes pnpm install, the script redirects the command to npm.
  
• Dependency Handling: The --legacy-peer-deps flag bypasses strict peer resolution errors between Ghost's internal dependencies without breaking runtime functionality.
  

Updating Ghost
With both shims active, execute ghost update under your unprivileged ghost user:

su - ghost
ghost update

Ghost-CLI will complete dependency fetching via npm, execute database migrations, and bring your instance online without requiring source modifications or custom CLI forks.