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Coming from Kamal
Kamal is a free, open-source deploy tool from 37signals with no dashboard and no managed services. Railyard keeps the same own-your-servers idea and adds the day-two tooling.
Why teams leave Kamal
Kamal is a solid, free tool for deploying containers to servers you own over SSH, and it proved the model Railyard builds on. The friction is that it’s a command-line tool, not a platform: you write and maintain the YAML, there’s no dashboard, no managed database backups, and no team roles or audit log.
Railyard keeps the same own-your-servers idea with a dashboard, managed addons and teams on top.
What comes with you
- Your repo, built from a Dockerfile — Kamal and Railyard both deploy containers.
- Your environment variables and secrets, previously held in your
deploy.ymland.kamal/secrets. - Your existing servers: attach them over SSH rather than rebuilding the fleet.
- Kamal’s zero-downtime rolling restarts carry over as Railyard’s verify-then-swap cutover.
The move
- Attach a server: an existing one already running your containers, or a new one Railyard provisions in your cloud account.
- Add your repo and point Railyard at your Dockerfile.
- Bring your config and attach the datastores your app expects as managed addons.
- Deploy to a temporary URL. Run your release task and verify.
- Move DNS. There is no outage; the old deploy keeps serving until the cutover.
What’s different
A dashboard, managed backups and team access control, without giving up the idea of deploying containers to servers you own.