What is Vercel?

Vercel is an amazing tool that allows you to build you own static sites with a few clicks of a button after setting up your account. Vercel makes the steps of deploying and scaling of your site almost effortless.

How to get started with Vercel

First, there are many ways to create an account with Vercel but I recommend to create an account through your Github. You can access the website using the link provided: Vercel Website
When creating your account through Github, it allows you to import your repositories with a few simple clicks of a button.

Vercel Demo using UI

In the picture below, is my first experience with deploying a static site on Vercel. When my instructor had given us the demo file, all I had to add was the ".env File" and copy and paste the content into the file.
Link to my deployment site
Here is a link to my Github repository if you would like to clone it and deploy it yourself:Vercel-Demo-Example

How to deploy the repo

First make sure you clone the repo or fork the repo provided above so that you can import it to your Vercel account. After that click "New Project" and make sure that you import the correct repository. After that the only thing that you need to do is to just type "dist" or "_site" into the output line on Vercel. In this demo we are going to use "dist" as the output. Once you do this, you are ready to deploy and now you can view the site! The cool thing about Vercel is when you update the Github repository to add more content, it will automatically update the changes to your deployment.

Deploying 11ty Projects using Vercel

Uploading your 11ty projects using Vercel is super easy and quick because they required little to no configuration. Here are my 11ty projects that I have deployed.

Link to my 11ty deployment
REPO My GitHub repo

Link to second 11ty deployment
Repo My Repo

If you haven't heard of 11ty check out my Blog post: Getting started with 11ty

Developer experience

Compared to the traditional CI/CD pipeline using GitHub, Vercel makes the experience of deploying your static site so much easier and quicker. The traditional CI/CD way of deploying your site can be extremely tedious and gives you little help on the errors you are getting. With Vercel, it was extremely clear when encountering an error during deployment.

More Links

Micro Front End Architecture by: Michael Potter
Vercel Docs For Environment Variables