When to use Kamal Deploy vs Redeploy?

What is the difference between kamal deploy and kamal redeploy? When using Kamal, when we do kamal help, there are two commands which seem similar. They are kamal deploy and kamal redeploy. In this article, we will find out the difference between both of those commands:

kamal deploy

This is the documentation for <a href="https://github.com/basecamp/kamal/blob/main/lib/kamal/cli/main.rb#L20">kamal deploy</a>

Deploy app to servers

Flags: option :skip_push, aliases: “-P”, type: :boolean, default: false, desc: “Skip image build and push”

kamal redeploy

This is the documentation for <a href="https://github.com/basecamp/kamal/blob/main/lib/kamal/cli/main.rb#L61">kamal redeploy</a>

Deploy app to servers without bootstrapping servers, starting Traefik, pruning, and registry login

Flags: option :skip_push, aliases: “-P”, type: :boolean, default: false, desc: “Skip image build and push”

As you can see from the documentation above, kamal redeploy just deploys the application to remote servers without doing anything else.

Conclusion

• When deploying your application for the first time, use kamal deploy.
• For subsequent deploys, you can use kamal redeploy . This should be faster since it doesn’t do bootstrapping servers, starting Traefik, pruning and registry login which are required just once.
• If for some reason kamal redeploy doesn’t work for subsequent deploys, feel free to use kamal deploy. It’s not like kamal deploy will throw an error for subsequent deploys.

If you’re looking for a guide to deploy a Rails application using Kamal, check out the Rails Kamal Series.