Scheduling a deployment to Vercel

Maybe you have dynamic calculations on your about page or like to line up posts for publishing at a future date. Whatever the reason, one solution is to have Vercel rebuild your static site at a time of your cron’s choosing.

We’ll use a GitHub workflow to run an action every day, and trigger a build using a Vercel Deploy hook.

Deploy hooks can be found within the Git settings of each project, and require a name and target branch.

https://vercel.com/{org}/{project}/settings/git

With a newly minted URL, we parameterise the GitHub workflow using a secret.

https://github.com/{org}/{project}/settings/secrets/actions

An example workflow that runs curl everyday at 02:00 looks like this:

name: Build

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

  schedule:
    - cron: '0 2 * * *'

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Trigger a deploy
        run: curl -X POST "${{ secrets.VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK }}"

Note, we can skip the time consuming check-out step as we only need to execute curl, which is baked into the CI environment.

Don’t forget to add the all-important workflow_dispatch trigger to enable manual testing at a time of our choosing. Otherwise, you could be waiting a few days to get things just right!