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

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1

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.

2

The domain troubleshooting guide can help with most custom domain configuration issues. You might be able to use that guide to solve it before a human is available to help you. Then you can come back here and share the answer for bonus points.

You can also use v0 to narrow down the possibilities.

5

Hi @alok-q-kumar, 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.

6

Hi @anshumanb ,

Thanks for your response.

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

  1. 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.
  2. I have limitation to deploy the my from main branch only to all environment. How can I deploy my code to different environments separately.
  3. Due to organization policy, I can not provide the Repo access to Vercel. So I am using Vercel CLI for deployment.
  4. 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

7

Hi @alok-q-kumar, yes, this should be quite possible and a good approach to keep same project. I’d approach it as follows:

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.