building with ghost

GCTools update: seed demo

Jon Hickman

Jun 8, 2026 • 1 min read

seed-demo has shipped — it's the latest feature I've added to GCTools. seed-demo allows you to quickly spin up a Ghost site with dummy content.

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GC what now? GCTools is a collection of command line utilities for working on content in Ghost. It's particularly useful for folks who are migrating to Ghost or doing a major refactor of a Ghost site. It's essentially a Swiss Army knife for making bulk changes to posts and pages.

GCTools has had a random-posts feature for some time—it allows you to add a number of Lorem Ipsum posts to a site. My colleague Paul tells me that random-posts mostly exists so he could stress-test other tools with an large number of posts (think, 100k+), but I have been using it to scamp up a quick demo on a new test site.

For my use case, random-posts lacks a little as it doesn't add images to the posts. seed-demo extends the concept to add feature images, image cards, a golden post (which demos all of the post content types), second author, nav bar, and lots of tags too.

If you need to populate a site with placeholder content, give it a whirl!

You can install GCTools here - here's the readme for seed-demo