Hello Vercel Community,

I am seeking help with a suspected deployment-environment classification and alias-metadata anomaly on a Hobby account.

Observed behavior:

• The project’s Production Branch was configured to its normal production branch.

• The deployment originated from a separate feature branch and was intended to be a Preview deployment.

• Before this first deployment attempt, the project had no existing deployments or aliases.

• The deployment source metadata showed the feature branch and expected commit, but the API reported the deployment target as production.

• The deployment ended in an ERROR state.

• The API reported aliasAssigned: false, while a feature-branch alias appeared in the project’s alias registry.

• The project had no custom domain and no environment variables scoped to Production. The relevant variables were scoped only to Preview and the feature branch.

For safety, cleanup has already been completed:

• The feature-branch alias was removed, and the alias list was verified empty.

• The failed deployment was removed, and the deployment list was verified empty.

• The Git integration was disconnected, and its project linkage was verified absent.

• No redeployment, promotion, or restoration was performed, and no database changes were made.

Could someone help clarify:

1. Why could a deployment sourced from a feature branch be classified as Production when the configured Production Branch was different?

2. Could this have been caused by project state, source metadata, CLI/API behavior, or an internal platform issue?

3. Did this deployment receive any Production environment variables, Production domain routing, or other Production-scoped configuration?

4. Why could aliasAssigned: false be reported while the branch alias existed in the alias registry?

5. What is the officially supported procedure for the next deployment to guarantee that it is Preview and cannot affect Production?

I can provide the exact project ID, deployment ID, deployment URL, branch name, commit SHA, API responses, CLI version, and relevant logs privately to verified Vercel staff. I will not post those identifiers publicly.

Please do not ask me to reconnect Git or create another deployment merely to reproduce the issue before the classification cause has been identified.