Show HN: I wrote a book on Kamal, deployment tool that's coming to Rails 8 (kamalmanual.com)

Josef here again[0] with another book :). This time about Kamal.

= Background

When 37signals released their new deployment tool Kamal[1], I was intrigued since it fits well with my 'keep it simple' deployment philosophy.

I slowly adopted the tool and today I deploy all new projects with Kamal.

However, I have seen people giving it a go and giving up, because the initial documentation was not enough.

So I sat down for a few weeks and wrote Kamal Handbook, the missing manual to Kamal.

= What's Kamal?

Kamal is an imperative deployment tool. It's basically a successor to Capistrano, but for a container era. It's a simple wrapper around Docker and that's the whole beauty of it.

37signals created Kamal to self-host Basecamp and Hey as part of their pull out of the cloud (running managed K8s).

It's expected to become a default gem for 'rails new' in Rails 8.

= Kamal Handbook

Kamal Handbook[2] is a short and to-the-point book on Kamal. I go through a first deploy, explain fundamental ideas, talk about configuration, show two more complex examples, and discuss topics like CD. It's under 100 pages including the code and illustrations.

It's a first ever book on Kamal, available as a PDF and ePUB (tested on Kindle Paperwhite). The website features a small preview and I made one more[3] specially for SHOW HN.

So far I sold something over 300 copies and I made the sale counter public for SHOW HN.

I am around to answer any questions.

Josef

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808 (SHOW HN of my previous book)

[1] https://kamal-deploy.org/ (Kamal official page)

[2] https://kamalmanual.com/handbook/ (Book official page)

[3] https://kamalmanual.com/handbook/first-deploy-preview.pdf (SHOW HN preview)