After deploying a few Rails apps with Kamal, I hit some friction: checking app status meant SSH or `kamal app details` per project, and deploying meant hopping between directories to run `kamal deploy`.
So I built HQ: a terminal dashboard to manage all my apps.
HQ is a terminal-based (TUI) dashboard for monitoring and managing Kamal-deployed projects from a single Ruby file.
What it does:
- Health monitoring at a glance (healthy, unhealthy, maintenance mode)
- Version tracking with highlights for outdated versions
- One-key deploy & maintenance toggle
- Action logs & health logs
- Auto-refresh every 30 seconds
- Background actions (deploys keep running even if you close HQ)
- Server grouping by host IP
Built with Bubbletea, Lipgloss, and Bubbles - Ruby ports of the Go Charm libraries. If you've used `lazygit` or `k9s`, you know what I'm talking about.
Follows the Elm Architecture (Model-View-Update). Surprisingly maintainable despite being a single file. State changes are explicit, UI is a pure function of state.
I know that similar projects exists but I am using this as an excuse to make a TUI using Charm Ruby.
Why TUI instead of a web dashboard?
Because I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway. TUI means:
- No browser tabs to manage
- No server to run
- Instant startup
- Works over SSH
- Looks cool (let's be honest 😄)
This HQ thingy is still young. Here are some ideas I'm currently exploring:
- Multiple server support per project
- Rollback functionality
- Integration with error tracking services
- Remote server health checks
You can read it in full blog post: https://didik.id/2026/03/22/hq-a-terminal-dashboard-for-kamal/
After deploying a few Rails apps with Kamal, I started to feel the friction. Every time I wanted to check if my apps were healthy, I had to SSH into the server or run kamal app details for each project. Deploying meant switching directories, running commands, watching logs. Toggling maintenance mode? More terminal juggling.
Didik Wicaksono ▶️🎮👨💻