Deploying Your Vibecoded Site to Vercel: The Complete Guide

By Ian, founder of CodeLazr · Updated 2026-09-14

You vibe-coded a site with AI and it works on your machine. Getting it live on Vercel is usually quick, but AI-generated projects tend to trip over the same few deployment problems. Here's how to get a clean first deploy and keep it working.

Get your site ready

Before deploying, make sure the project actually builds:

Run the production build locally (npm run build) until it passes consistently. A dev server that runs is not the same as a build that passes.
Check that every environment variable the code reads is documented, and that nothing secret is hardcoded.
Make sure API routes and server functions work without local-only files or services.
Confirm your package.json lists every dependency the build needs. AI edits sometimes import a package without adding it.

Choose how to deploy

Connect your GitHub repo in the Vercel dashboard. This is the easiest option: every push to your main branch deploys to production, and every pull request gets its own preview URL.
Use the Vercel CLI (npm i -g vercel, then vercel) if you want to deploy from your terminal.
Import a static site by uploading it in the dashboard if there is no build step.

Vercel detects most frameworks (Next.js, Vite, Astro, SvelteKit) automatically and picks the right build command and output directory. You only need to override them for custom setups.

Configure environment variables

Add environment variables in Project Settings → Environment Variables, and set them separately for Production, Preview, and Development if the values differ. Keep secrets out of your repo and out of client-side code. After changing variables, redeploy so the new values are picked up.

Fix the most common build failures

Missing dependency: the build log says a module can't be found. Add it to dependencies in package.json.
Type or lint errors: a local dev server may ignore them, but a production build fails. Run the same build command locally to reproduce.
Wrong Node.js version: set the Node.js version in Project Settings or the engines field in package.json to match what you use locally.
Function timeouts: long-running API routes can hit your plan's function duration limit. Move slow work to a background job or raise the limit where your plan allows it.
Case-sensitive imports: ./Button and ./button may both work on macOS but fail on Vercel's Linux build machines.

Monitor after launch

Turn on Vercel Analytics or Speed Insights to watch real performance, and check the deployment logs whenever something breaks. Preview deployments let you test every change on a real URL before it reaches production.

Let your AI fix failed deploys

If you vibe-code with CodeLazr, your commits go straight to GitHub, so Vercel deploys them automatically. CodeLazr watches the deployment status, and when a build fails it pulls the real Vercel error log and hands it back to the AI model for a focused fix. You review the fix as a diff before it's committed. See how that loop performed in the SaaS landing site case study, where each model's output was deployed for real.

Focus on getting your build passing locally first. Once it does, Vercel handles most of the heavy lifting.