Kamal

I come from the Ruby on Rails world and the latest popular tool in that community is Kamal. Kamal is a useful tool to quickly deploy a Rails application to a server and manage other deployed services through what Kamal calls “accessories.” At my day job, I was tasked with building a small internal tool application using any framework I preferred, followed by deploying it to a suitable environment. I decided to use Tanstack Start and to run it on a plain old VPS. There are probably better hosting solutions, but due to the nature of the application, a VPS was perfectly sufficient. Since that was the case, I decided to go ahead and just use Kamal to manage deployments and make it easy for anyone else working on the application to do deploy as well. ...

Edit: In the original version of this post I made a mistake. This post has been corrected. See the details at the below for an explanation of the mistake and the solution. Mistake Summary & Solution In the original version of this post I had stated that the App servers IP in the Kamal configuration should be set to it’s public IP. This is incorrect. With the SSH proxy pointing at the public IP as well, this resulted in a jumphost connection problem, meaning it tried to connect to the public IP through a proxy of the public IP. This obviously didn’t work and resulted in inconsistent behavior with Kamal. The solution was to replace the App servers IP address to be the private IP instead. As a result, the only place the public IP of the server is referenced is in the Kamal SSH proxy configuration. ...