Kamal provided a good resource on how to set it up.

I recommend for you to use the recommended ruby installation.

Install Kamal

This is done on your Personal Computer.

Verify everything is installed correctly, by:

kamal version

It should output its latest version.

Afterwards, setup Docker Hub account. We will host our Docker images here and use the public free images.

Initiating Kamal

Now that the gem is installed, you can now begin the init setup.

kamal init

This will add a bunch of files, but we should focus on config/deploy.yml.

Replace everything accordingly as follow:

This can be confusing, I know, but it's pretty simple as follow:

1. If you do not have a domain, don't worry, we will configure in a separate learning module.
2. servers.web is the IP Address of your homelab. Still remember?
3. registry.username is your Docker username earlier.
4. image is the docker registry repository from the previous step.
   • Mine is zafranudindev/demo-homelab-day.
   • Replace the <replace_me> with yours.
5. proxy.host take note of this, even if you haven't buy any domain yet. See the end of tutorial later for why.

Edit config/deploy.yml.

# Name of your application. Used to uniquely configure containers.
service: demo-homelab-day

# the image name to be hosted in the registry
image: <replace_me>/demo-homelab-day

servers:
  # your homelab local network, e.g 172.168.0.5
  web:
    - 172.168.0.5

proxy:
  ssl: false
  # don't  change for now, you'll see by the end of tutorial
  host: homelab.my-local-network.com
  app_port: 5000
  forward_headers: true
  healthcheck:
    path: "/"

registry:
  # change to your docker username
  username: <change_me>
  password:
    - KAMAL_REGISTRY_PASSWORD

builder:
  arch: amd64

Run Kamal setup

With everything in place, let us start the setup!

export KAMAL_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=<your_docker_password_earlier>
kamal setup

(click image to enlarge)

You will face an error, that is OK and intended. Let us proceed to the next step!