Comment by pqdbr
This looks really nice, congrats!
1) I see Kamal was an inspiration; care to explain what differs from it? I'm still rocking custom Ansible playbooks, but I was planning on checking out Kamal after version 2 is released soon (I think alongside Rails 8).
2) I see databases are in your roadmap, and that's great.
One feature that IMHO would be game changer for tools like this (and are lacking even in paid services like Hatchbox.io, which is overall great) is streaming replication of databases.
Even for side projects, a periodic SQL dump stored in S3 is generally not enough nowadays, and any project that gains traction will need to implement some sort of streaming backup, like Litestream (for SQLite) or Barman with streaming backup (for Postgres).
If I may suggest this feature, having this tool to provision a Barman server in a different VPS, and automate the process of having Postgres stream to it would be game changer.
One barman server can actually accommodate multiple database backups, so N projects could do streaming backup to one single barman server.
Of course, there would need to be a way to monitor if the streaming is working correctly, and maybe even help the user with the restoration process. But that effectively brings RTO down to near 0 (so no data loss) and can even allow point in time restoration.
1) Kamal is more geared towards having one VPS for project - it' made for big projects really. They also show on the demo that even the db is hosted on its own VPS. Which is great! But not for me or Sidekick target audience. Kamal V2 will support multi-projects on a single VPS afaik
2) yes yes yes! I really like litestream. Also backup is one of those critical but annoying thing that Sidekick is meant to take care of for you. I'll look into Bearman. My vision is like we would have one command for most popular db types and it would use stubs to configure everything the right way. Need to sort out docker-compose support first though...