Running My First Kamal Deploy

I recently got the chance to build a small internal tool for our team. And when it came time to deploy, I really wanted to try out Kamal, the new deployment tool built by Basecamp (37Signals). It was easier than I had first anticipated. Kamal is a CLI and deployment scripting tool that allows you to setup servers and subsequently deploy your app to them. You can use this to deploy many types of applications, you just need a Dockerfile and some changes to Kamal's configuration. It's different from using a managed hosting provider like Render or Heroku. But it affords you the ability to easily ship containerized apps to raw servers - either ones that you host yourself or Digital Ocean Droplets, EC2, or GCP. Generally speaking, this has cost benefits as these raw resources are usually cheaper. At the time of writing, the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet is $4 a month and usually sufficient for a small footprint app. And it's also important to note that Kamal isn't just for Rails. Today, I want to briefly cover some things that I learned about Kamal while building this app.