The Complete Guide to Deploying Rails 8 with Kamal on Hetzner

I wrote the end-to-end deployment guide I wish existed when I first set up Rails 8 with Kamal.

Most tutorials cover bits and pieces - here's one that covers everything from a bare server to production.

What it covers

• Ordering and provisioning a Hetzner dedicated server
• Ansible provisioning with kamal-ansible-manager
• The production Dockerfile (jemalloc, Thruster, multi-stage build)
• Kamal deploy.yml — every section explained
• The full Solid stack: Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Solid Cable with 4 separate SQLite databases
• ActiveStorage in proxy mode for Cloudflare caching
• First deploy with kamal setup
• Cloudflare DNS, SSL (Full mode), and CDN caching
• Hetzner Storage Box for off-server backups via Samba/CIFS
• Netdata for server monitoring
• Litestream for continuous SQLite replication
• docker-volume-backup for daily storage snapshots

The stack

No Postgres. No Redis. No PaaS. Everything runs on a single server for ~36 EUR/month.

Client → Cloudflare → kamal-proxy → Thruster → Puma → Rails 8

Read the full guide here: The Complete Guide to Deploying Rails 8 with Kamal on
Hetzner

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.