Dev Tools

Spoiler: Basecamp shipped Kamal 2 and it's the closest thing to "git push heroku main" I've felt since 2014. Do not @ me — I migrated a side project off Netlify Functions for the bin and it actually worked.

The Setup

Kamal is a ruby gem that wraps Docker, Traefik, and SSH into one deploy command. You point it at a VPS, hand it a yaml file, and it does zero-downtime rolling deploys with health checks. On my M4 Mac it takes about two minutes from cold.

# config/deploy.yml
service: astro-site
image: aidxn/astro-site

servers:
  web:
    hosts:
      - 5.161.42.7
    options:
      network: "private"

registry:
  username: aidxn
  password:
    - KAMAL_REGISTRY_PASSWORD

env:
  secret:
    - SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY
    - PIPEDRIVE_API_TOKEN

proxy:
  ssl: true
  host: deploy.aidxn.com

The Money Pattern

One command, zero downtime, real SSL. The new kamal-proxy replaces Traefik for most cases and the health-check window is configurable per service. Behold:

kamal setup           # first-run bootstrap
kamal deploy          # build, push, swap

# rollback if something explodes
kamal rollback v42

# tail logs across all hosts
kamal app logs --follow

The Catch

It feels imperative. There's no built-in observability — no metrics, no tracing, no dashboard. You bring your own Grafana or you live in tail-logs land. And it's still ruby-first, so if your team can't read a Gemfile you'll trip on edge cases.

The Verdict

For solo-dev VPS deploys and small teams, Kamal 2 is the new default. Pair it with a $6 Hetzner box and a Supabase backend and you've got a Heroku-tier DX for the price of a coffee. Multi-tenant SaaS still wants Netlify or Fly for the niceties, but for everything else Kamal earned the slot.