PriceGhost for Online Price Tracking

scott · January 31, 2026, 10:28pm

PriceGhost is a self-hosted price tracking application that can monitor prices from any website. The rapidly changing prices of memory and storage makes an app like this critical for Home Labbers.

I am hosting PriceGhost inside of an Incus container. If you are not familiar with Incus, go watch my Incus Containers Step by Step tutorial.

Start by Creating a container for PriceGhost:

incus launch images:ubuntu/24.04 PriceGhost -p default -p bridgeprofile -c boot.autostart=true -c security.nesting=true

Move inside the new container.

incus shell PriceGhost

Update the container.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

Install dependencies.

apt install openssh-server nano net-tools curl -y

Install docker from the script on the docker website.

curl https://get.docker.com | sh

Create a user account.

adduser scott

Put my user in the docker & sudo groups.

usermod -aG sudo,docker scott

Move to the new account.

su - scott

Create a folder and move into it.

mkdir priceghost && cd priceghost

Edit a docker compose file.

nano compose.yml

Paste the following into the file.

services:
  # PostgreSQL Database
  postgres:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    container_name: priceghost-db
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: priceghost
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
      - ./database/init.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init.sql:ro
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
    restart: unless-stopped

  # Backend API
  backend:
    image: ghcr.io/clucraft/priceghost-backend:latest
    container_name: priceghost-backend
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: postgresql://postgres:postgres@postgres:5432/priceghost
      JWT_SECRET: ${JWT_SECRET:-change-this-in-production-use-strong-secret}
      PORT: 3001
      NODE_ENV: production
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    depends_on:
      postgres:
        condition: service_healthy
    restart: unless-stopped

  # Frontend
  frontend:
    image: ghcr.io/clucraft/priceghost-frontend:latest
    container_name: priceghost-frontend
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    depends_on:
      - backend
    restart: unless-stopped

Save the file with a CTRL O and enter and then a CTRL X to exit the nano editor.

Edit an environment variables file.

nano .env

Paste the following into the editor.

# Database
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your_secure_password
POSTGRES_DB=priceghost

# Backend
JWT_SECRET=your_jwt_secret_here
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://postgres:password@db:5432/priceghost

# Frontend (optional)
VITE_API_URL=/api

Be sure to change your JWT_SECRET to some random value. Save the file with a CTRL O and enter and then CTRL X to exit the editor.

Create the data folders.