Vercel is the company behind Nextjs and also a hosting platform that works with static site generates (Huga, Jekyll, Zola, etc.) and server side generators (Nextjs). I’ve been using them to host my new blog since it’s inception because they promise — and mostly make good on the promise — easy deployments. Well… ian.ist is a little different because it’s two different repos. There is the Sylvan repo which contains the Nextjs code that parses org files and displays the content and there is my private org repo which holds the content. Because I’m using a private repo I can’t use Vercel’s built in build process, and because I’m trying to build Syvlan to be more of a framework than a personal tool, even if Org was public it’d be hard/impossible to build the site with Vercel’s tooling. Luckily they have a path forwards with building and deploying with Github Actions as well. I set this build process to run in the Org repo. I have already detailed my build process in Deployment. How Do?, but I am going to just include the worflow file here as well, because it’s changed a little since then.

name: GitHub Actions Vercel Production Deployment

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  repository_dispatch:
    types:
      - sylvan-update
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  Deploy-Production:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Sylvan
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          repository: pard68/sylvan
      - name: "Remove the Sylvan .git dir"
        run: "rm -rf .git"
      - name: Checkout Org content
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          path: org/
      - name: "Remove files marked :PRIVATE: t"
        run: 'find ./org -type f -exec grep -q "^:PRIVATE: t\$" {} \; -delete'
      - name: Move the org repo .git dir to root to satisfy Vercel
        run: mv org/.git ./
      - name: Merge org content with default Sylvan content
        run: mv org/* public/
      - name: Install Vercel CLI
        run: npm install --global vercel@latest
      - name: Pull Vercel Environment Information
        run: vercel pull --yes --environment=production --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
      - name: Build Project Artifacts
        run: vercel build --prod --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
      - name: Deploy Project Artifacts to Vercel
        run: vercel deploy --prebuilt --prod --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}

The changes are what this post is about.

The issue I was facing after the initial deployment was that my Vercel project was being updated by changes to the Sylvan repo, which means that when those changes got triggered, built, and then deployed I would end up with a blank website, because there is no content in the the Sylvan repo. My initial fix was to disable Vercel from accessing my Github repos and that worked for a few days but then I noticed that the GH Actions were starting to fail so I had to come up with a new solution or get off Vercel.

My solution was based on a hunch. There was no reason that Vercel should know about Sylvan. I never told it about Syvlan when I created the project. The only way it could know Syvlan existed is if it was scraping the .git/ when I deployed via the Vercel CLI tool. So I followed my hunch, deleted that directory and then replaced it with the Org repo’s .git/ directory.

SUCCESS! Almost.

Now it was building based on triggers from the Org repo, which is better, but those builds will always fail because the org repo has no Nextjs code to deploy! So then I removed the step to copy the org repo’s git directory to the root. The Github action actually failed this time, it seems that the Vercel CLI requires the thing being uploads to use git, and without the .git/ directory, there is essentially no git.

Next idea: dummy git repo:

- name: Created a dummy git repo
  run: git init . && git commit -a -m "boop"

This didn’t work because git didn’t know my user.email or user.name. Before I invested in bootstrapping git, I had had another idea; instead of creating a dummy git, just remove the remote, which I assume is how Vercel is finding the org repo.

- name: Move the org repo .git dir to root to satisfy Vercel
  run: mv org/.git ./
- name: Expunge git remote
  run: git remote remove origin

The build and deploy worked! But when I pushed a new commit to Github Vercel tried to build the project again, which of course failed. On a whim I checked the Vercel project and it had somehow connected itself to the org repo. I deleted the connection and… SUCCESS!

It’s a little more work than I wanted, but I can keep using Vercel at least!