RailsConf 2025 From FTP to Kamal: 20 Years of Deploying Rails by Ben Curtis

RailsConf 2025 marks the end of an era—so let’s take a ride through Rails history, deployment-style! From the Wild West days of FTP and CGI to the golden age of Capistrano, Passenger, and Heroku, all the way to Docker and Kamal, Rails deployment has been a journey of innovation, frustration, and occasional existential dread. In this talk, we’ll revisit the tools, hacks, and battle scars of Rails deployment over the last 20 years. Remember Mongrel? FastCGI? The magical experience you had the first time you ran 'git push heroku'? We’ll celebrate the evolution of Rails ops, the community that shaped it, and what lessons we should take into the next 20 years. Whether you deployed your first Rails app last week or you’ve been around since script/server, this talk is for you. Expect nostalgia, war stories, and callouts to the projects that paved the way to (and give some background on) what we have today. No grand lessons. No deep takeaways. Just a celebration of how far we’ve come.