Vercel

Vercel is a cloud platform that allows you to simply deploy web applications. Vercel can deploy Evidence apps from a Git repository.

Vercel lets you host a public version of your app for free, or you can create and host a password-protected version with Vercel's $150/month pro plan.

Prerequisites

• An Evidence project pushed to a Git service like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
• A Vercel account.

Deploy Evidence to Vercel

1. From the Vercel dashboard, select Add new… Project
2. Import the Git repository containing your Evidence project.
3. Edit the build and output settings:
   • Build command: npm run sources && npm run build
   • Output directory: build
4. (If using a monorepo) edit the root directory to point to your Evidence project
5. Edit the environment variables:
   • With your Evidence dev server running, use the Copy All button on the settings page
   • Paste them into the Vercel environment variables section, (they will automatically populate all the fields)
   • Alternatively, you can find credentials in connection.options.yaml files in your /sources/your_source directory. The key format used should be EVIDENCE_SOURCE__[your_source]__[option_name] (Note the casing matches your source names, and the double underscores). Note that the values are base64 encoded, and will need to be decoded.
6. Click Deploy

Your app will be deployed to https://[project-name].vercel.app

Domains, Authentication and Scheduling

Authentication

Your deployed app will be public by default.

Global password

This requires a Vercel paid plan with advanced deployment protection, starting at $150/month.

Vercel Dashboard > [your-project] > Settings > Deployment Protection > Password protection

Custom domains

Your app will be deployed to https://[project-name].vercel.app

You can set a custom domain using Vercel from the console:

Vercel Dashboard > [your-project] > Settings > Domains

Data refresh

Your project will be automatically built when you push to your repository, refreshing your data.

Schedule updates using Deploy Hooks

If you want your site to update on a specific schedule, you can use GitHub Actions (or another similar service) to schedule regular calls to a Vercel deploy hook.

1. Create a Vercel deploy hook. This will give you a URL that GitHub will use to trigger builds
2. Add VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK to your Github Repo's Secrets
   • In your GitHub repo, go to Settings > Secrets > Actions and click New repository secret and create a secret, VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK, with the URL from step 1.
3. Add a schedule file to your project
   • Create a new directory in your project called .github
   • Within that directory, create another called workflows
   • Add a new file in .github/workflows called main.yml
4. Add the following text to the main.yml file you just created. Be sure that the indentation in your main.yml matches the below.

name: Schedule Vercel Deploy
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 10 * * *' # Once a day around 6am ET (10am UTC)
jobs:
  build:
    name: Request Vercel Webhook
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: POST to Deploy Hook
        env:
          BUILD_HOOK: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK }}
        run: curl -X POST -d {} $BUILD_HOOK

5. See your GitHub Actions run in the Actions tab of your GitHub repo