Vercel & Netlify

~9 min · vercel, netlify, preview

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Git-push deploys; CI is a complement

Vercel and Netlify both deploy on every push when you connect a repo. You usually don't need a workflow to deploy them. What workflows still buy you:

Pre-deploy checks they don't run themselves (link checks, image-optimization audits, content validation).
Triggering Vercel/Netlify deploys via deploy hook from a workflow that does manual gating.
Smoke tests against the preview URL after the platform deployed.
Sticky PR comments with the preview URL + checks summary.

Vercel CLI deploy from CI

If you want CI to control the deploy explicitly:

vercel deploy --prebuilt --token=$VERCEL_TOKEN --prod

This decouples build from deploy: build once in CI, then push the prebuilt artifact to Vercel.

Code

Smoke test against the preview URL·yaml

  preview-smoke:
    if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'
    needs: vercel-deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Wait for Vercel preview
        uses: patrickedqvist/wait-for-vercel-preview@v1.3.2
        id: preview
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          max_timeout: 300
      - name: Smoke test
        run: |
          curl -fsS "${{ steps.preview.outputs.url }}/api/health"
          curl -fsS "${{ steps.preview.outputs.url }}/" | grep -q '<title>'

External links

Exercise

If you deploy via Vercel or Netlify, add a smoke-test job that hits the preview URL after each deploy and verifies a critical endpoint or page. The smoke is your guardrail when the preview ships an unintended regression.