Vercel for GitLab automatically deploys your GitLab projects with Vercel, providing Preview Deployment URLs, and automatic Custom Domain updates.
For advanced usecase, you can use Vercel with GitLab 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 GitLab Self-Managed 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 GitLab CI/CD 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 CI/CD Pipeline.
Let’s create our CI/CD Pipeline by creating a new file .gitlab-ci.yml
:
default: image: node:16.16.0
deploy_preview: stage: deploy except: - main script: - npm install --global vercel - vercel pull --yes --environment=preview --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN - vercel build --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN - vercel deploy --prebuilt --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN
deploy_production: stage: deploy only: - main script: - npm install --global vercel - vercel pull --yes --environment=production --token=$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 pushed to a git branch
- Another that creates production environments on commits to the
main
branch
Finally, let’s add the required values from Vercel as CI/CD variables in GitLab:
- Retrieve your Vercel Access Token
- Install the Vercel CLI and run
vercel login
- Inside your folder, run
vercel link
to create a new Vercel project - Inside the generated
.vercel
folder, save theprojectId
andorgId
from theproject.json
- Inside GitLab, add
VERCEL_TOKEN
,VERCEL_ORG_ID
, andVERCEL_PROJECT_ID
as CI/CD variables.
Now that your Vercel application is configured with GitLab CI/CD, you can try out the workflow:
- Create a new merge request to your GitLab repository
- GitLab CI/CD will recognize the change and use the Vercel CLI to build your application
- The pipeline uploads the build output to Vercel and creates a Preview Deployment
- When the merge request is merged, a Production build is created and deployed
Every merge request will now automatically have a Preview Deployment attached. If the merge request needs to be rolled back, you can revert and merge the MR and Vercel will start a new Production build back to the old git state.