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Building Your Own Vercel: A High-Level Guide

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Why Build Your Own Deployment Platform?

Deployment platforms like Vercel and Netlify have revolutionized how we ship web applications. They offer incredible features like preview deployments for every pull request and seamless production pipelines. But this convenience comes at a cost, both in terms of monthly bills and a loss of control over your infrastructure.

For many developers and teams, building a custom, DIY deployment platform is a powerful alternative. It gives you complete control over your workflow, provides predictable costs, and eliminates any vendor lock-in.

The main benefits of a DIY approach are:

  • Predictable Costs: You pay a flat fee for your server(s), not a variable cost based on build minutes or function invocations.
  • Total Control: You own the entire stack. You can configure your servers, reverse proxies, and CI/CD pipelines to match your team's exact workflow.
  • No Limitations: You're not limited by the features or restrictions of a third-party platform. If you need a specific tool or a unique setup, you can build it.

A Blueprint for Your Own Platform

Building a Vercel alternative doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. You can start small and scale up your infrastructure as your needs grow.

  • Hobby Level: For personal projects, a single, simple VPS (Virtual Private Server) is often enough to handle both production and preview deployments.
  • Team Level: For small companies, a more powerful server or a multi-server setup with a load balancer can handle the increased traffic and developer collaboration.
  • Organization Level: For larger companies with high-traffic applications, a scalable, resilient system using container orchestration like Kubernetes becomes the ideal solution.

The Core Technical Components

Regardless of the scale, the core of a DIY deployment platform relies on a few key components working together:

  • Server & Reverse Proxy (Nginx): A Linux server to host the applications, with a reverse proxy like Nginx to route traffic. Nginx can be cleverly configured to direct traffic to your main production app or to any number of preview deployments based on the domain name.
  • Secure Environment Management: A system to securely manage environment variables for different environments (development, preview, production). Tools like dotenv-vault are excellent for this.
  • CI/CD Automation (GitHub Actions): A robust CI/CD pipeline is the engine of the platform. Using a tool like GitHub Actions, you can create workflows that automatically build, test, and deploy a unique preview environment for every pull request, and a separate, more controlled workflow for deploying to production.

Dive Deeper: The Full Guide

This post provides a high-level overview of the concepts behind building your own deployment platform. The full, in-depth guide I wrote, with complete server setup instructions, Nginx configurations, and ready-to-use GitHub Actions workflows, was published on TheMoonDevs.

If you're ready to take control of your deployments and build a platform that works exactly the way you want, check out the full article.

Read my full guide on Medium: DIY Vercel: Building Your Own Deployment Platform