What is Shippy?

Shippy is a minimal, opinionated deployment tool for Composer based PHP projects, inspired by Deployer and Capistrano.

It ships as a single Go binary. The target server needs nothing beyond an SSH account and rsync: Shippy connects over SSH, streams your project to the server with rsync, mirrors it into a fresh timestamped release directory, links the shared files, runs your commands, and only then flips the current symlink. If a deployment turns out to be wrong, shippy rollback points that symlink back at any previous release.

Features

• Zero-downtime deployments with atomic releases
• Release management — keeps last N releases with easy rollback
• Deployment locking — prevents concurrent deployments to the same host
• Shared files/directories — persistent data between releases
• Template variables from composer.json
• Pure Go implementation — single binary, no local dependencies
• rsync transfers — one delta stream per deploy, so unchanged files never travel twice
• Deny-by-default file selection — explicit allowlist, nothing ships unless you include it
• SSH-based deployment with key authentication
• Colored output — clear, beautiful deployment progress
• TYPO3 optimized — sensible defaults for TYPO3 projects

How it compares

Deployer and Capistrano are excellent, and Shippy borrows their on-server layout wholesale — the same current / releases/ / shared/ convention, so the two are interchangeable from the server's point of view. The differences are deliberate:

• No runtime on the deploying machine. Deployer is a PHP application that lives in your composer.json; Capistrano is a Ruby gem. Shippy is one static binary with the rsync client built in, which makes it equally simple to run from a laptop, a GitHub Actions runner, or a GitLab CI job.
• A small configuration surface. One .shippy.yaml with hosts and commands, rather than a scripting DSL. Everything Shippy does is in the config file.
• Sensible TYPO3 defaults. shippy init writes a configuration that already knows about var/log/, public/fileadmin/ and the TYPO3 console commands — though nothing about Shippy is TYPO3-specific.

Requirements

• SSH access to the target server with key authentication configured
• rsync installed on the target server (Shippy drives it over the SSH connection; see How files are transferred)
• Go 1.26 or higher, only for building from source

Prebuilt binaries are available via Homebrew, go install, and a Docker image, so Go is only needed if you build from source. See Installation.

Next steps

• Installation — get the binary
• Quick Start — first deployment in four commands
• Configuration — everything .shippy.yaml can express
• File Selection — the allowlist that decides what ships
• Commands — full command and flag reference