Managing Ships

Ships are the core unit in Omaship—each ship is a fully configured application with its own repository, server, and deployment pipeline. Here's everything you need to know about creating and managing them.

Creating a New Ship

From your dashboard, click "Create New Ship" and choose your stack:

Rails

The default and most fully-featured option. You get a production-ready Rails 8 app with all Omaship engines pre-installed—CI/CD, preview deployments, payments, backups, admin dashboard, and more.

Additional ship types (Next.js, Node.js, generic Dockerfile) are on the roadmap. Rails is the fully supported option today with all Omaship engines pre-installed.

Ship Dashboard Overview

Every ship has a dashboard showing its current state at a glance:

Status indicator — Current ship status (see below)
Recent deployments — Last deployments with commit messages and timestamps
Preview deployments — Active PR previews with their URLs
Domain & SSL — Your configured domain and certificate status
Repository link — Direct link to your GitHub repo
Resource usage — Server metrics and storage

Configuring Ship Settings

Domain

Your ship's domain is configured during creation, but you can change it later in Settings → Domain. After changing, update your DNS records to point to the new ship's server IP.

A     @                  → [Your server IP]
A     www                → [Your server IP]
CNAME *.preview          → yourdomain.com

SSL certificates are automatically issued via Let's Encrypt once DNS is configured. See the DNS Setup guide for details.

Features

Toggle Omaship engines on or off in Settings → Features:

Preview deployments — PR preview URLs at pr-N-preview.yourdomain.com
Automated backups — Daily backups with local and cloud storage
Payments — Stripe integration for subscriptions and one-time payments
Newsletter — Email campaigns and subscriber management
Admin dashboard — User and content management interface

Ship Statuses

Your ship goes through several statuses during its lifecycle:

Pending — Ship record created, no run has started yet
Provisioning — A ship run is currently executing setup and deploy steps
Live — Ship is deployed and serving traffic. Everything is working
Error — The latest run failed. Check the run timeline and execution logs for details

Stuck in "Provisioning"? If your ship has not moved past provisioning after 5 minutes, check the latest run timeline, review execution logs, then use the Troubleshooting guide if needed.

Deleting Ships

Deleting a ship is permanent. It removes the server, deployment pipeline, and all Omaship configuration. Your GitHub repository is not deleted—you keep your code.

Warning: Deletion cannot be undone. Make sure you have everything you need from the repository before deleting.

Next Steps

Deployment Guide — Understand how deployments, previews, and rollbacks work
DNS Setup — Configure your domain
Troubleshooting — Common issues and solutions