2025 · intermediate
Using Kamal 2.0 in Production
Kamal is a tool that offers zero-downtime deploys, rolling restarts, asset bridging, remote builds, accessory service management, and everything else you need to deploy and manage your web app in production with Docker.
Kamal 2.0 was released in September of 2024, and replaced Traefik with a new proxy, enabling automatic HTTPS, and multiple apps to be deployed to a single server.
Rails 8.0 was released in November of 2024, and pre-configures Kamal 2.0 for new applications.
In this talk I want to draw a distinction between using Kamal for deployment (getting your app on a server and starting it there), and using Kamal as a part of a larger effort to put your app in production - with things like automatic backups, logging dashboards, and monitoring.
This will venture into topics that aren't covered by the existing website, "Missing Manual" handbook, or videos which understandably focus only on Kamal itself.
I'll also cover when to chose a PaaS, when to chose Kamal, and how you can even run them side by side, something I do myself.