How can I use Bitbucket Pipelines with Vercel?

​Vercel for Bitbucket automatically deploys your Bitbucket projects with Vercel, providing Preview Deployment URLs, and automatic Custom Domain updates.

For advanced use-cases, you can use Vercel with Bitbucket Pipelines as your CI/CD provider to generate Preview Deployments for every git push and deploy to Production when code is merged into the main branch.

This approach is useful for developers who want full control over their CI/CD pipeline, as well as Bitbucket Data Center users, who can’t leverage Vercel’s built-in git integration.

You can view the completed example here or follow this guide to get started.

You can build your application locally (or in a Pipeline) without giving Vercel access to the source code through vercel build. Vercel automatically detects your frontend framework and generates a .vercel/output folder conforming to the Build Output API specification.

vercel build allows you to build your project within your own CI setup, whether it be Bitbucket Pipelines or your own in-house CI, and upload only those build artifacts (and not the source code) to Vercel to create a deployment.

vercel deploy --prebuilt skips the build step on Vercel and uploads the previously generated .vercel/output folder from the Bitbucket Pipeline.

Let’s create our Pipeline by creating a new file bitbucket-pipelines.yml:

image: node:16.16.0
pipelines:
  branches:
    feature/*:
      - step:
          name: Install Vercel CLI, Pull Vercel Environment Information, Build Project Artifacts and Deploy Project Artifacts to Vercel
          script:
            - npm install --global vercel
            - vercel pull --yes --environment=preview --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
            - vercel build --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
            - vercel deploy --prebuilt  --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
    main:
      - step:
          name: Install Vercel CLI, Pull Vercel Environment Information, Build Project Artifacts and Deploy Project Artifacts to Vercel
          script:
            - npm install --global vercel
            - vercel pull --yes --environment=production --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
            - vercel build --prod --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
            - vercel deploy --prebuilt --prod --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN

This pipeline has two triggers:

• One that creates preview environments on commits to branches prefixed with feature/
• Another that creates production environments on commits to the main branch

Finally, let’s add the required values from Vercel as secured environment variables in Bitbucket:

1. Retrieve your Vercel Access Token
2. Install the Vercel CLI and run vercel login
3. Inside your folder, run vercel link to create a new Vercel project
4. Inside the generated .vercel folder, save the projectId and orgId from the project.json
5. Inside Bitbucket, add VERCEL_TOKEN, VERCEL_ORG_ID, and VERCEL_PROJECT_ID as secured environment variables.

Now that your Vercel application is configured with Bitbucket Pipelines, you can try out the workflow:

• Create a new pull request to your Bitbucket repository
• Bitbucket Pipelines will recognize the change and use the Vercel CLI to build your application
• The Action uploads the build output to Vercel and creates a Preview Deployment
• When the pull request is merged, a Production build is created and deployed

Every pull request will now automatically have a Preview Deployment attached. If the pull request needs to be rolled back, you can revert and merge the PR and Vercel will start a new Production build back to the old git state.