Vercel Deploy

Lesson 3 · Deploy · $vercel-deploy

Deploy an approved and tested committed web project to a Vercel preview and verify provider identity, commit, status and actual URL. Use for publishing a website preview; production needs separate approval, and feature building or browser QA belong to other skills.

Sample Codex prompt:

Use $vercel-deploy to inspect this course project's prerequisites without making provider requests. Verify the current source, committed revision and matching passing Build/Test records. If the instructor has supplied a real Vercel demo project and deployment id, read back that exact preview and page; stop for missing access and request explicit approval before any deployment.

Prerequisites

Requires the course foundation (PR #222), Python 3.10+, and the sibling Lesson 3 packages. Build needs Node.js; Test needs the pinned Playwright/Chromium environment; actual Deploy needs instructor-provisioned Vercel access. Run commands from the handbook root. On Windows, use python or py instead of python3 as appropriate.

Five-minute quickstart

After Build and Test, replace TEST_ID below with the actual passing test id. This offline exercise reads local prerequisites, never contacts Vercel, and produces no real preview URL:

python3 skills/vercel-deploy/scripts/course_deploy.py prerequisites --project .local-state/course-site --test-id TEST_ID

Expect needs_setup (exit 1) for the uncommitted starter or missing provider link. Inspect each check and provider_contacted: false; these are setup findings, not a failed deployment. A ready local check still requires provider verification. examples/readback-cases.json explains the later provider outcomes.

For a real preview, the instructor supplies an existing Git-linked Vercel demo project, a reviewed commit, matching build/test records and its actual deployment id. Set VERCEL_ACCESS_TOKEN privately or use a protected --vercel-token-file; never paste the credential into a prompt. Substitute the angle-bracket values (they are placeholders, not runnable sample IDs):