Pre-deploy checks in Vercel platform

[kevinwolfcr]

Hello, I don't know if this is already planned or has been discarded. But here goes my idea:

The Problem

Currently, I am not directly using Vercel GitHub integration to automatically deploy my website. Instead, I am using a GitHub action that triggers a deployment that happens after my tests pass.

However, I (and I imagine other people too) am doing some hacks in order to make the appropriate Vercel environment variables available to my CI pipeline (running integration and e2e tests and applying migrations to staging/production database).

Another solution I have explored is to have a custom prebuild script that checks if process.env.VERCEL is defined, and triggers that CI pipeline.

Proposed Solution

I know this is a really big feature and I don't know the internal Vercel infrastructure. However, for end-users, I think this "pre-deploy checks" could be configured in vercel.json, something like this:

vercel.json

{
  preDeploy: {
    image: "any-docker-image", // if not provided, a default container could be provided, or no container at all?
    steps: [{
      id: "build",
      cmd: "npm run build"
    }, {
      id: "lint",
      needs: "build",
      cmd: "npm run lint",
    }, {
      id: "test",
      needs: "build",
      cmd: "npm run test"
    }, {
      id: "dbMigrate",
      needs: ["lint", "build"],
      cmd: "prisma migrate deploy"
    }]
  }
}

On the above configuration, I was able to:

1. Specify an optional docker image that may have some pre-installed software required to verify my project
2. Specify a step dependency via the needs argument, allowing parallelism or wait-for-another job features.

Conclusion

As I said before, I don't know if this has been thought before, is on the roadmap, or completely discarded, but since my POV, it could help to make Vercel more awesome than it already is.

Thanks!