kamal_podman is a Ruby gem designed to integrate the power of Kamal for deployment management with Podman as the container manager. This gem provides an alternative to Docker for those who prefer or require Podman's daemonless architecture and enhanced security features.

Kamal Integration: Kamal Podman extends the functionality of Kamal, a deployment tool from Basecamp, allowing you to deploy your applications using Kamal's commands and configurations. Podman Utilization: Instead of Docker, this gem uses Podman for managing containers, providing a lightweight, user-space focused container runtime.

Please note that Kamal Podman is still under development. Not all features are fully implemented or tested. Incomplete Features: Some Kamal commands might not translate directly to Podman's API, leading to partial functionality or differing behavior. Experimental: The gem is in its experimental phase, and you might encounter bugs or unexpected behaviors.

Kamal base version: 2.10.1

You can simply drop in this gem to an existing Kamal based project and start deploying with Podman instead. However you will need to run kamal app remove and kamal proxy remove to avoid any conflicts. Be aware this will completely shutdown and remove your current application.

This gem installs a kamal-podman executable so it won't conflict with the standard kamal command if you have both gems installed.

# Gemfile
gem 'kamal_podman', git: 'https://github.com/phoozle/kamal_podman.git', branch: 'main'

Use kamal-podman wherever you would normally use kamal:

kamal-podman deploy
kamal-podman setup
kamal-podman app logs

Follow Kamal's official documentation for the most part. There will be some differences in the commands available due to the inherit nature of how Podman does things. I will begin to document these differences as I find them here.

• Complete integration of all Kamal commands with Podman.
• Systemd integration
• Enhance error handling and logging.
• Increase test coverage for better reliability.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run ./bin/test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

# Run unit tests
bin/test

# Run integration tests (requires Docker/Colima)
ruby -Itest test/integration/main_test.rb test/integration/deploy_test.rb

Integration tests verify that kamal_podman works correctly with real Podman containers, including a full E2E deploy. They use Docker Compose to orchestrate:

• A deployer (Ruby 3.4 + Podman) that builds/pushes images and runs kamal
• A vm1 (Ubuntu 24.04 + Podman + SSH) as the deployment target
• A local registry for image storage (no Docker Hub dependency)

The deploy test builds an app image, pushes to the local registry, deploys via kamal deploy, and verifies both the app container and kamal-proxy are running on vm1 — all using Podman, not Docker.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/phoozle/kamal_podman.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Kamal::Podman project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.