Motivation

The problem

Deploying a Node.js application directly to a server is a common need. Tools like Capistrano (Ruby) and Deployer (PHP) have solved this problem well for their ecosystems for years — versioned releases, shared directories, automatic rollback, composable tasks.

The Node.js ecosystem had no real equivalent.

PM2 deploy

For a while, PM2 deploy filled that gap. It handles the basics: SSH into a server, pull the code, restart the process. But it comes with limitations that become apparent quickly:

• Configuration lives inside ecosystem.config.cjs, mixed with process management config
• No control over the number of releases to keep
• The pipeline is fixed, with no way to insert custom steps

What Catapult is

Catapult is a Capistrano-style deployment tool for Node.js. It brings the same concepts — releases, shared directories, task pipeline, automatic rollback — to a TypeScript/JavaScript project, with no Ruby or PHP required.

It works over plain SSH. No agent to install on the server, no daemon to manage, no cloud dependency. Just a deploy.ts file in your project and an SSH key.

The pipeline is fully composable: add tasks, remove them, override built-in ones, or replace the whole sequence. Recipes handle common stacks (AdonisJS, PM2, rsync, git) and can be mixed freely.