A small but useful realization from recent client work: Kamal isn’t only for applications you build yourself.

For a long time I assumed Kamal’s workflow was push-repo → build-image → ship-to-server, and that’s it. The documentation walks you through that path, and most online examples reinforce it.

I wrote up the pattern with a working Campfire deploy.yml, the command flow, and the gotchas I hit (architecture matters even without building, healthcheck paths aren’t universal, pin your tags) on my blog.

https://mariochavez.io/desarrollo/2026/05/04/deploying-prebuilt-docker-images-with-kamal/