The next phase of Shipyrd, desktop

There are a lot of options for monitoring out there. We need to know when we’re running out of the essential metrics like CPU, memory, and disk. There are really easy ways to check these metrics whenever you need, before you add any monitoring to your applications, but that’s obviously a bit painful to SSH into your server(s) and run a few commands like free -m, htop, df, etc.

Kamal is a pretty powerful and simple tool for deploying your web app via Docker containers. As it turns out Kamal actually has a server exec command that lets you run any command you’d like on your servers. This is great for patching your servers or perhaps running a docker stats command to see how your containers are doing. If we can run some of these basic commands via Kamal on our servers to fetch some stats, we’d have a simple monitoring solution out of the box, nothing to install if you’re already deploying via Kamal.

First, some backstory. I actually built this feature into Shipyrd called runners. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a way to run Kamal commands on your servers. The idea being that you could easily tail your logs with kamal logs or check your app’s status with kamal app details. It worked, and it was pretty neat, but I didn’t like having that attack vector of having to add an authorized key to your servers.

There are a lot of applications that you do have to grant SSH access around continuous deployment and other things, but I didn’t want to deal with that. So I disabled it behind a feature flag while I figured out a different approach with the end goal being to make a more Heroku-like management experience for your Kamal deployed apps.

Fast forward to now. I realized we should just utilize the existing access controls and work stations that everyone is already using, your machine. If you have access to your servers and can successfully run kamal commands against them, then we can just leverage all of that existing control and work.

So I ripped runners out from Shipyrd on the web and have been building out Shipyrd Desktop. A control center for your Kamal deployed apps.

If you deploy with kamal then you automatically get container stats, server stats, recent deploy information, and a command runner interface out of the box with Shipyrd Desktop.

Shipyrd Desktop works with the hosted web version by showing you the latest deploy details, lets you compare changes, and see what’s On Deck to be deployed. You can also lock a destination before you kick off a deploy to give your team a heads up that you’re about to deploy.

If you’d like to grab a copy, subscribe to Shipyrd product updates below, and I’ll send you more information soon when it’s ready.