DEV Community

Aaron Lienhard
Aaron Lienhard

Posted on

Deploying a Site with Vercel

What is Vercel?

  • Vercel is a platform that allows you to easily build, deploy, and scale a website and have it viewable to the world in literal seconds.

  • If you ever had trouble getting a site to build using GitHub Pages, Vercel takes away all the extra work and configures everything for you.

  • I've never had an easier time when it comes to deploying a website than when I used Vercel.

How to get started with Vercel

  • To get started with Vercel you are going to want to go to their website. The homepage will look like this:

Vercel Website Homepage

  • Once here you can install Vercel either to a specific project or globally using the command below. Use the command either in a specific project directory or just as you launch terminal.

npm i -g vercel

  • You next step will be to login to Vercel and provide access to your GitHub account. Once your GitHub account has access you can go to your dashboard and create a project.

  • Once you click the create a project button you can choose a GitHub repository you will like to deploy and then it's as simple as pressing the deploy button. As long as the code is all in the correct directories and npm start is working then the website should deploy with no issues.

11ty Blog Site Deployed with Vercel

  • Here is an example of a blog site I created with an 11ty template. I was able to deploy the website through Vercel and have this live version for anyone to go to and look at the website.

11ty Blog Website

To access the website you can click here.

ist-vercel-demo Deployed with Vercel

  • Here is the ist-vercel-demo we had to clone for class and then get working as a website with Vercel.

ist-vercel-demo Website

The link to the site is here.

  • Getting this website to deploy was as simple as clicking the button and waiting for Vercel to do its job. Seriously made creating a website one of the simplest processes ever.

How does Vercel compare to other ways of deploying as a developer

  • Compared to using GitHub pages and manually setting up work flows can be frustrating to say the least. Compared to Vercel it is seriously night and day with how simple you can get a repository running on the web.

  • If I knew someone who wanted to get their GitHub repo working online and seeing a working website, I would immediately point them to Vercel as I believe it's one of the best ways to do what they want to do.

Top comments (0)