• 👍 One command VPS setup (docker, traefik, sops, age)
• 💻 deploy any application from a dockerfile
• ✊ Zero downtime deployment
• 🌏 High availability and load balancing
• 🔒 Zero config SSL Certs
• ✅ Connect domains or use sslip.io out of the box
• 🔥 Built in integration with SOPS
• 🛸 Escape the vendorlock forever

I'm tired of the complexity involved in hosting my side projects. While some platforms, like Fly.io, stand out in the crowded field of Heroku replacements, I believe a simple VPS can be just as effective. That's why I created Sidekick: to make hosting side projects as straightforward, affordable, and production-ready as possible. You'll be surprised how much traffic a $8/month instance on DigitalOcean can handle.

Using brew:

brew install sidekick

NOTE: Sidekick uses brew later on to handle installing sops on your local. So brew is a requirement at this point. Sidekick will throw an error if brew is not found. You can install brew from here.

Sidekick helps you along all the steps of deployment on your VPS. From basic setup to zero downtime deploys, we got you! ✊

First you need a VPS with Ubuntu LTS. I recommend DigitalOcean. Hetzner also gets very good reviews. You can host your own silicon too. As long as you have a public IP address you can use Sidekick.

Just make sure the following is true:

• VPS running Ubuntu - LTS recommended
• SSH Key available on your machine to login to VPS.

That's it!

First you need to setup your VPS. To do this you need to run:

sidekick init

Then you need to enter the following:

• IP Address of your VPS
• An email address to use for setting up SSL certs

After that Sidekick will setup many things on your VPS - Usually takes around 2 mins. If you run this command once more and enter a different IP Address, Sidekick will warn you that you are overriding the current config with a prompt.

You can use flags instead. Read more in the docs.

Read more details about flags and other options for this command on the docs

In your application folder, make sure you have a working Dockerfile that you can build and run. Also make sure you know at which port your app is expecting to receive traffic.

Then run:

sidekick launch

Then you need to enter the following:

• Url friendly name of your app - if you opt to use sslip.io domain for testing this would be your subdomain
• HTTP exposed port for your app to get requests - Sidekick will scan your docker file to try to extract this number and default it.
• Domain at which you want this application to be reachable - If you choose your own domain make sure to point the domain to your VPS IP address; otherwise we default to sslip.io domain so you can play around.
• If you have any env file with secrets in it. Sidekick will attempt to find .env file in the root of your folder. Sidekick will use sops to encrypt your env file and inject the values securely at run time.

Should take around 2 more mins to be able to visit your application live on the web if all goes well.

At any point any time you need to only run:

sidekick deploy

That's all. It won't take long, we use cache from earlier docker images, your latest version should be up soon. Sidekick will deploy the new version without any downtime - you can see more in the source code. This command will also do a couple of things behind the scenes. You can check that below

sidekick deploy preview

• https://fly.io/
• https://kamal-deploy.org/

Simple CLI tool that can help you:

• Setup your VPS
• Deploy all your side projects on a single VPS
• Load balance multiple container per project
• Deploy new versions with Zero downtime
• Deploy preview environments with ease
• Manage env secrets in a secure way
• Connect any number of domains and subdomains to your projects with ease

You can easily remove sidekick if you hate it.

brew uninstall sidekick

I still have a couple more feature I want to add here. Also considering some of those to be on a paid version.

• ✅ Preview env deployments
• A way to deploy more complicated projects defined in docker compose file
• Better zero downtime deploys with watchtower
• Firewall setup
• Managing multiple VPSs
• Easy way to deploy databases with one command
• TUI for monitoring your VPS
• Streaming down compose logs - ala fly logs
• Auto deploy on image push - to work with CICD better
• Git hooks setup for managing migrations and other concerns

Download SIDEKICK