I made Mushak out of frustrtaion. There are many amazing tools out there these days to deploy your apps to your own servers. I've used a shell script to deploy my apps many years (using Docker and Compose since 2016 or so).

Although tools like Dokku, Coolify and Kamal exists (and they are amazing) they all have tradeoffs. Dokku comes with the plugin system when it comes to DBs etc. which I don't like. Coolify since v4 it has 4 containers running to get started. Kamal is pretty awesome but the build process and config file which is mandatory and also secrets management is time consuming to get up and running.

Mushak is very simple. If you have A Docker or compose file, it should JUST WORK.

Create a .env.prod file in, and it will detect it and pushes it to the server if you want. You'll deploy to prod faster than you can believe it with zero config out of the box.

Hope this will help anyone out there, I really enjoy deploying my apps with it. Documentation will also clarify the architectural choices.

Best, Hamed

Thanks!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144275

Personally what I ended up doing with my vps was to just have a docker-compose.yaml and then just docker-compose it to start it and then I have a custom script which would run a service at a port after which I can just "bash expose.sh subdomain.domain.app PORT" and it uses cloudflared/cloudflare tunnels under the loop and if someone wants a git like workflow, I recommend pushing docker images and then using watchtower (https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/)

I had tried to understand caddy but I instead went the cloudflare tunnels route.