GitHub Actions

It was 11pm on a Friday. Deploy failed. Missing environment variable. After twenty minutes of debugging, I found it: I’d added a secret to CI but forgot to add it to the server. Two-minute fix, twenty-minute hunt. I’d been burned enough times to finally fix this properly. The Core Insight One source of truth for production secrets. 1Password holds the secrets. Kamal fetches them. GitHub Actions triggers the deploy. No scattered env files on servers, no secrets in CI config. ...

Building Review Apps with Kamal and GitHub Actions When I was using Heroku at work, one feature stood out as a game-changer for our development workflow: Review Apps. They made pull request testing seamless—isolated environments spun up automatically, inherited configuration from staging, and even provisioned separate add-ons like PostgreSQL and Redis. It transformed how we collaborated and tested changes. Fast forward to today. I’m running my Agentify app on a Hetzner server using Kamal for deployment. Everything is containerized with Docker—from local development with devcontainers and ngrok for tunneling, to production deployment on my Hetzner box. As I dove deeper into agentic coding, I found myself wishing for that same pull request workflow. I wanted to test changes in isolation, share environments with others, and validate features before merging. ...