Deploy Forge
A free Bash toolkit that deploys code to a plain SSH server with zero downtime, and automatically rolls itself back if the new version fails a health check.
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Description
Deploying to a single server over SSH is normally an all-or-nothing moment: you copy the new code over, restart the app, and hope nothing breaks — if it does, you're manually digging through the old version to restore it. Deploy Forge removes that risk by keeping every release in its own folder and flipping a symlink to switch versions instantly, so a bad deploy can be undone in the time it takes to run one command, or automatically the moment a health check fails.
Deploy Forge is an open-source (MIT) Bash toolkit built around three scripts: deploy.sh orchestrates atomic releases via symlink swap (an OS-level rename, not a copy, so switching is instant and never leaves a half-deployed state), preflight.sh checks disk space, inodes, permissions, TLS cert expiry and symlink integrity before a deploy starts, and rollback.sh restores a previous versioned release on demand. It ships with ready-made GitHub Actions workflows, Nginx config examples, systemd templates and a multi-stage Docker PHP-FPM image, aiming at teams running one or a few VPS-style servers who want zero-downtime releases without adopting Kubernetes.
💬 Our review
The short version: Deploy Forge gives you Kubernetes-style zero-downtime deploys and automatic rollback on a single plain Linux box, with nothing more exotic than Bash and SSH.
Most zero-downtime deploy tooling assumes you're already on Kubernetes or a PaaS like Render/Railway that manages this for you behind the scenes — Deploy Forge is aimed squarely at the teams still deploying over SSH to a VPS who want that same safety net without the orchestration overhead. It's free and MIT-licensed, so the only real cost is a Bash learning curve for teams unfamiliar with shell scripting, and it won't help you coordinate deploys across multiple servers. Worth adopting the moment an SSH-deployed app has caused a bad-release scare; skip it if you're already on Kubernetes or a managed PaaS where this problem is already solved.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Gratuit, licence MIT
Pros
Déploiements atomiques zero-downtime via swap de symlink
Rollback automatique déclenché par un échec de health check
Vérifications préflight poussées (disque, inodes, permissions, certificats TLS)
Cons
SSH uniquement, pas d'orchestration cloud-native ni multi-serveur
Bash uniquement, courbe d'apprentissage pour les équipes non habituées au shell
Communauté encore très petite