I see a lot of people using Komodo for it, though if I had to pick I'd go with Doco CD[0]. You can also use standard Ansible for just cron+bash script to git pull.

On the Podman side, I wrote a tool named Materia[1] for it, but there's also the wonderful Ansible quadlet role as well as Quadit and Orchess.

[0] https://github.com/kimdre/doco-cd

[1] https://primamateria.systems or https://github.com/stryan/materia

A long long time ago I wrote something for the company I was with to allow for pre-merge staging environments (preview environments but I didn't have a name for them then)

Used docker-compose + git for application servers, and docker-compose + sync for static sites.

Actually worked pretty well! There's bound to be better options nowadays.

I recently setup Arcane and started migrating stuff from Truenas apps, they were all deployed as custom docker compose services so it worked out. Arcane supports Git syncs to auto deploy compose stacks, https://getarcane.app/docs/features/projects#sync-from-git I'll write up some posts on my full setup soon.

What _IS_ Arcane? I fail to understand from their website https://getarcane.app/

Is it a deployment automation platform where it can run a project’s docker services, with rollback and all?

so, the project is pretty much vibe coded, including the docs. It makes a lot more sense if you play around with it. It's just a docker host management UI, I like using it. It has gitops built in and a nice container log view. It doesn't do rollbacks, it only seems to sync from git and run compose up.

Is it analogous to portainer with a git-pull-compose-apply loop?