Kamal's missing tutorial – how to deploy a Rails 8 app with Postgres to your VPS

Last updated: Jan 2026. Now fully updated for Rails 8.1+ and Kamal 2.8+! Rails 8 is out. And with it Kamal 2, the new default way of deploying Rails apps. For those unfamiliar, Kamal is a tool that puts your Rails app in a Docker container, which makes it easier to deploy it anywhere. But it comes with its own learning curve. I personally found Kamal hard for the uninitiated. Many things were missing in the official docs, and I didn’t find any good tutorial on how to get a full whole Rails app in production using Kamal 2 – from scratch to fully in production, accounting for all the moving pieces a Rails app usually needs. .