Dmk
Xamal is a deployment tool for Elixir apps that deploys native releases to bare metal servers over SSH. It’s a port of GitHub - basecamp/kamal: Deploy web apps anywhere. · GitHub (Basecamp’s Docker deployment tool), but replaces Docker containers with Elixir releases and kamal-proxy with Caddy.
If you’ve used Kamal, the workflow is the same - same YAML config structure, same CLI commands, same hook system and secrets management. The key differences:
- Elixir releases instead of Docker containers - built with mix release, distributed as tarballs
- Caddy instead of kamal-proxy - automatic TLS via Let’s Encrypt, zero-downtime blue-green deploys via port switching
- Erlang SSH instead of shelling out to ssh - uses the :ssh stdlib with connection pooling
- Escript CLI - single binary, no Ruby or Docker required on the deploying machine
Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmkenney/xamal/master/install.sh | bash
Or build from source with mix escript.build. Requires Erlang/OTP 26+ on the machine running xamal.
Quick start
xamal init # generates config/deploy.yml and sample hooks
xamal setup # bootstraps servers and deploys
xamal deploy # subsequent deploys
xamal rollback # roll back to previous version
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thiagomajesk
Wow, this seems really cool! I was thinking about this since they announced Kamal. Thanks for working on it, will definitely check it out!
rhcarvalho
What was the rationale to ditch Docker?
rhcarvalho
I’m also curious about this. IIRC in the Kamal 2 conference talk they explain why they replaced Traeffic with their own proxy to use an imperative model (instead of declarative – Kamal being imperative itself), fixing some bugs and moving part of the deploy logic to the tailor-made proxy.
Dmk
It was two-fold.
So mostly just an itch I had for a while to simplify things since we really don’t need Docker with Elixir.
Dmk
I don’t think I watched this talk, but did briefly read the rationale behind their switching somewhere. My decision to use Caddy instead of GitHub - basecamp/kamal-proxy: Lightweight proxy server for Kamal · GitHub was just that I was more familiar with Caddy.
I still have to test deploying multiple apps to a single server (all of my apps have 1 per server) - so depending how that goes maybe the Kamal proxy will make more sense (or not!).
rhcarvalho
Thanks for sharing!
Just like they made a custom proxy that understands their needs (Rails), I can see a world where a custom proxy (or an off the shelve proxy configured appropriately) that understands the BEAM, Phoenix and LiveView could be beneficial.
krasenyp
Cool project but please, this has nothing to do with bare metal. To deploy something on bare metal would mean for it to run directly on the CPU which is definitely not the case here.
Dmk
I’m not following. I feel like you are using a different definition of bare metal that I am not intending in this context.
krasenyp
What’s the other definition than software that’s close to the hardware, like an OS itself, a bootloader, a unikernel? Not running in a container, but running on a high-level OS, maybe even in a virtual server is not software running on bare metal.
Dmk
You can use this to deploy to a bare metal server. IE no hypervisor layer, no shared CPU, etc. That is “bare metal”. Could be a server in your basement, or a Hetzner Dedicated instance.
Agreed that running this in a VPS (which works fine as well) would not be considered bare metal.