Hi Vercel Community,

I’m trying to establish a fail-closed first deployment for a brand-new Vercel project that must not bootstrap through Production.

Environment:

• macOS
• Node.js v24.19.0
• Vercel CLI 59.0.0
• new project with no current deployments
• no custom domain or Production cutover

Observed behavior:

An earlier controlled staging attempt intended to be Preview/non-production produced a deployment object whose provider-side target was production and reached READY. That deployment was removed, and the project returned to zero deployments.

This appears closely related to the still-open public issue #17069: “CLI preview deployments are unexpectedly created with target=production”.

I need a supported way to make the FIRST remote deployment non-production. Creating a successful Production deployment first and then using Preview later is not acceptable for this workflow.

Alternative paths already checked:

1. Custom Environment capability: accountLimit.total = 0, environments = [].
2. Manual provisioning canary: requested Preview, but Vercel refused before creating a deployment object with Manual provisioning is not enabled for this team. Deployment count remained 0 afterward.
3. Standard Preview deployment has not been retried with the current validated candidate because the first-deployment target-classification risk remains unresolved.

Questions:

1. Is there a supported way on a new/no-prior-deployment project to guarantee that the FIRST deployment is created with provider-side target=preview, without first creating a successful Production deployment?
2. Is the deployment object’s provider-side target field authoritative? If not, which field should be treated as authoritative?
3. Is manual provisioning available for Hobby accounts in any supported way, or only for specific plans/accounts?
4. Is there a supported non-production custom environment path for this situation on Hobby, or does it require a paid plan?
5. Has issue #17069 received a fix, rollout, workaround, or account-specific remediation that is not yet reflected publicly?

I intentionally omitted project/team identifiers and other private details from this public post. I can provide additional non-sensitive reproduction details if helpful.

Thanks.