Kamal was introduced in 2023 (back then as MRSK) as an alternative way to deploy and manage containers on a server. It is marketed as Capistrano for containers, and as a big fan of the simplicity of Capistrano I was intrigued. I despise the political ideas of one of Kamal’s creators, but I think on the tech/implementation side he is promoting solutions that I honestly think are good (including HTML over the wire). Kamal is ‘simply’ some tooling around running images using Docker on a server, with zero-downtime deployments.

Some preparation

This is how I prepared for my testing:

1. I had to set up an SMTP server as my sendmail solution (that actually worked quite well for my smallish projects, no need for sendgrid or the like); see my post on getting Chasquid up and running on Debian.
2. I installed docker from the Debian repo’s (and not Docker’s), so it is automatical…