🚀 How to deploy Rails with Kamal (guillaumebriday.fr)

If you’ve been following Rails news lately you would’ve been hearing all about Kamal, the deployment framework from 37signals and DHH. In some ways it reminds me a lot of Dokku (which I’ve written about extensively) — Kamal is a tool for deploying apps to your own servers, letting you reap all the associated benefits (like cheap hardware costs!).

I’ve trawled through a bunch of articles on Kamal, and this one stood out to me as a great introduction. The author, Guillaume, does a great job breaking down some real code examples that you can use to deploy a Ruby on Rails app with a SQLite database (see last issue for more SQLite).

Another great introduction article I found was one called Production-Grade (ish) Rails deployment on Hetzner with Kamal (luizkowalski.net) — it has some great diagrams and covers a more complicated deployment, but it’s not explained as thoroughly as the main article here, so I’ve kept it as an aside.

I’m really curious to hear from you all about Kamal — have you used it? Are you using it to run a decently sized production-grade app? Reply to this email, I’d love to chat about it! Otherwise, enjoy the articles 👍️ 

→ 💽 How to deal with PostgreSQL Backups using Kamal (botzenhart.io)

This is a great article for anyone actually using Kamal and trying to figure out how to deal with database backups! The author, Stefan, is a longtime reader of the newsletter (👋 hey Stefan!) and he’s really gone all-out with the depth of this article.

He dives into setting up the Kamal accessory correctly, handling backups to S3-like services, restoring backups and much, much more. A really great read if you’re looking to use Kamal in production (or already are!).

→ ⚡️ Deploying Rails on a single server with Kamal (nts.strzibny.name)

Another great Kamal deployment guide, this time by Josef. I’ve included this article for its depth — he’s dug deep into deploying a bunch of different things, including: PostgreSQL, Redis, ActiveStorage, static assets and more.

→ 🖥️ Kamal Series Part 1: Deploy Rails application on Hetzner (joshio1.blog)

We’ve slowly gotten to the base of the iceberg — the first couple of articles we the tip of the iceberg (decent overviews), we’ve worked our way down the iceberg with some more advanced articles, and finally we’re at the bottom. This article is part one of a 4 part mega-series on Kamal deployments.

It’s another brilliant resource that walks you through just about everything you’ll ever need to know about Kamal deployments 😅 

For the past few weeks, but particularly these last two, I’ve been really pushing the development of my upcoming Ruby on Rails template. It’s been in the works for a few months now, and I’ve mentioned it in the BTS section before, but it’s finally coming together!

I consider the template ~95% done, and I tweeted this week about writing the documentation for the template — I want this template to have the best documentation of any Ruby on Rails template, and I’ve put together nearly 10,000 words of docs to walk people through every single thing they need to do, to get set up.

If you’re interested in a feature overview, this is the final breakdown:

• Authentication with Devise, including OAuth login with Google and Github, password login, and password resets.

• Payments with the Pay gem including integrations with Stripe and Paddle for handling subscriptions. I’m also hoping to add Lemon Squeezy as a payment provider soon.

• Deployment to Render, Heroku and Hatchbox using a custom rails g deploy generator for creating the required files.

• A small test suite in both minitest and rspec, so you can pick the test suite you prefer.

• Plus more! Handy scripts, walkthrough videos, and more.

My aim is to provide an extremely solid foundation for people to build ontop of — I’ve kept it relatively simple, with a small featureset, and a tiny set of extra gems.

Let me know if you’re interested! I’m at the point where I’d love to share it with a few people and get their feedback on using it. If you haven’t already purchased RailsNotes UI, I’d be happy to send you a free license in return for help testing it out + some detailed feedback.

If you’re keen, just reply to this email and I’ll get back to you!

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