How to Configure Dev, QA, UAT, and Prod Environments?

(edited)

I’m working on a multisite Next.js app hosted on Vercel, with a Headless CMS as the backend. Both frontend and backend have four environments — Dev, QA, UAT, and Prod. Since Vercel supports custom environments, what’s the recommended setup for managing these environments? ->Create separate Vercel projects for each environment (Dev, QA, UAT, Prod), or ->Use a single Vercel project with multiple custom environments configured? I’m looking for guidance based on best practices for deployment workflow, environment variables, and multisite management.

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https://vercel.com/docs/projects/domains/troubleshooting

vercel.com

Troubleshooting domains

Learn about common reasons for domain misconfigurations and how to troubleshoot your domain on Vercel.

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Vercel Staff

Hi , welcome to the Vercel Community!

If your Next.js app is both the backend and frontend for the product then one Vercel project with 4 environments should be the way to go.

Usually the goal for different environments is to have different DB_URL or secrets of some kind. I think Vercel Environments are good for this use case.

If you have different build steps for each environment then I think you may need to go for the 4 separate projects for your app. But, honestly that might be an overkill.

Hi ,

Thanks for your response.

I have the following scenarios. Could you confirm whether a single Vercel project would work well for all of them?

I have four environments and each environment have their own environment specific variables/secrets configured in vercel. Based on these App fetch the data from backend and render.
I have limitation to deploy the my from main branch only to all environment. How can I deploy my code to different environments separately.
Due to organization policy, I can not provide the Repo access to Vercel. So I am using Vercel CLI for deployment.
It is a multisite setup so my environments will have multiple domains such as for Dev environment domains can be “dev.example-1.com” and “dev.example-2.com”.

Can you also please share the pros and cons of using Single vs Multiple projects?

Thanks, Alok Kumar

Vercel Staff

Hi , yes, this should be quite possible and a good approach to keep same project. I'd approach it as follows:

Create a Vercel project
Create the 4 environments on Vercel
Assign custom the domains to each environment

In your deployment pipeline, you can pull the environment vercel env pull --environment=ENV_NAME. Then use deploy#target option to deploy your code to a specific environment, as follows: vercel deploy --target=ENV_NAME.

I hope this helps.

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