Kamal’s effectiveness is undeniable. Its integration with power-efficient bare-metal servers, such as those available on Hetzner.com, elevates its appeal, allowing for the simultaneous deployment of multiple Rails applications (or applications developed with other frameworks) on a single server. This setup can be further enhanced with the inclusion of additional components like PostgreSQL or Redis.

It’s important to note that while each service in this configuration operates within its own namespace, Traefik does not share this characteristic; only one Traefik service can be included in our setup. In my scenario, I’ve designated the Prograils service, which powers the prograils.com website, as the primary service. Below is the complete configuration for this setup:

Although there are some existing solutions to expose local port to the internet, I’ve decided to use self-hosted solution. I’ve prefered this over hosted one for few reasons:

1. I wanted to have some pre-configured subdomains
2. I wanted those subdomains to be fixed and/or reserved just for me
3. Custom domain was a nice addition
4. Cost of hosted solution was just too high to justify it.
5. It was just a fun exercise

Idea is simple - anyone accessing address like some_name.yourdomain.dev will actually access your dev environment on specific port, eg. localhost:3000. Overall cost of that will be 5$ for cheapest linode + domain cost.

Protobuf or more precisely Protocol Buffers is a data serialization format developer by Google and it is designed to be language-agnostic. What’s important (and what makes it a better choice than ie. JSON) is that it automatically provides validation of data, preserves order in arrays and provides pre-generated classes that do all the hard work with set of setters and getters. Magic is done by compiling .proto files with schema into language files.