PolicyEngine Vercel Deployment

Standard patterns for deploying frontend apps (interactive tools, dashboards, static sites) to Vercel under the PolicyEngine team.

Deployment

Team and scope

All PE apps deploy under the policy-engine Vercel team:

vercel link --scope policy-engine
vercel --prod --yes --scope policy-engine

Naming convention

Projects use the pattern policyengine--{repo-name}:

policyengine--marriage.vercel.app
policyengine--aca-calc.vercel.app
policyengine--state-legislative-tracker.vercel.app

Vercel auto-assigns a random production URL (e.g., marriage-zeta-beryl.vercel.app). Use that in apps.json as the source URL since custom aliases may have deployment protection issues.

First deploy

cd my-project

# Link to team (creates .vercel/)
vercel link --scope policy-engine

# Deploy
vercel --prod --yes

Subsequent deploys

vercel --prod --yes --scope policy-engine

Environment variables

For apps with API backends (e.g., Modal):

# Set env var (Next.js uses NEXT_PUBLIC_* prefix)
vercel env add NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL production

# Must force-redeploy after changing env vars
vercel --prod --force --yes --scope policy-engine

Next.js apps access env vars via process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL.

Verify deployment

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://your-app.vercel.app/
# Should return 200

Common issues

Deployed to personal account: If vercel --prod goes to your personal account, delete .vercel/ and re-link:

rm -rf .vercel
vercel link --scope policy-engine
vercel --prod --yes

Deployment protection (401): Team deployment protection may block unauthenticated access to alias URLs. Use the auto-assigned production URL instead, or configure in Vercel dashboard > Settings > Deployment Protection.

Generic project names: Never use generic names like app or site — they can steal domains from other projects. Always use descriptive names.

vercel.json

Must be at repo root. For Next.js static exports, configure rewrites as needed:

{
  "rewrites": [{ "source": "/(.*)", "destination": "/index.html" }]
}