This boilerplate uses a manual approach for the CI/CD pipelines and requires us to merge our changes to the main branch to avoid accidential changes in our production environment. However, it’s also possible to automate all of that using Vercel’s build in CI/CD pipeline or using GitHub actions.

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Pre-Requisites

Before getting started, please disable Branch Tracking for the Preview environment in the Vercel dashboard so that we can avoid automatic deployments. Please also make sure to assign the appropiate domains to the Preview (preview.example.com) and Production (example.com) environments.
1

Push Code to preview

git checkout -b preview
git add .
git commit -m "last commit"
git push origin preview
2

Preview Build

In order to preview the changes, we need to build the preview environment using the following command:
vercel deploy --target=preview
This will trigger a preview build and our preview URL will be assigned to the preview environment (e.g., preview.example.com) - which we have defined earlier.
3

Production Build

If the preview environment is working as expected, we can merge the changes to the main branch and run the following command to build the production environment:
vercel --prod
This will trigger a production build and our production URL will be assigned to the production environment (e.g., example.com) - which we have defined earlier.

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Environment Variables

Ensure all required environment variables are configured in both preview and production environments. The .env variables should be the same so that we can test the whole project in the preview environment before switching to production.