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

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Alok Kumar (@alok-q-kumar) · 2025-10-08

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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system (@system) · 2025-10-08

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](https://community.vercel.com/t/introducing-the-vercel-leaderboard/1358).

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

You can also use [v0](https://v0.dev/) to narrow down the possibilities.


Anshuman Bhardwaj (@anshumanb) · 2025-10-09

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.


Alok Kumar (@alok-q-kumar) · 2025-10-09

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


Anshuman Bhardwaj (@anshumanb) · 2025-10-10

Hi @alok-q-kumar, 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](https://vercel.com/docs/domains/working-with-domains/add-a-domain-to-environment)

In your deployment pipeline, you can [pull](https://vercel.com/docs/cli/env#extended-usage) the environment `vercel env pull --environment=ENV_NAME`. Then use [deploy#target](https://vercel.com/docs/cli/deploy#target) option to deploy your code to a specific environment, as follows: `vercel deploy --target=ENV_NAME`.

I hope this helps.