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Deploying Projects from Vercel CLI

The vercel command is used to deploy Vercel Projects and can be used from either the root of the Vercel Project directory or by providing a path.

terminal
vercel

Deploys the current Vercel project, when run from the Vercel Project root.

You can alternatively use the vercel deploy command for the same effect, if you want to be more explicit.

terminal
vercel [path-to-project]

Deploys the Vercel project found at the provided path, when it's a Vercel Project root.

When deploying, stdout is always the Deployment URL.

terminal
vercel > deployment-url.txt

Writes the Deployment URL output from the deploy command to a text file.

The first deployment of a new project is always a production deployment, even when you run vercel without --prod. Later deployments without --prod create preview deployments.

By default, when you promote a deployment to production, your domain will point to that deployment. If you want to create a production deployment without assigning it to your domain, for example to avoid sending all of your traffic to it, you can:

  1. Turn off the auto-assignment of domains for the current production deployment:
terminal
vercel --prod --skip-domain
  1. When you are ready, manually promote the staged deployment to production:
terminal
vercel promote [deployment-id or url]

To deploy a locally built Next.js app or another Vercel project, run vercel build followed by vercel deploy --prebuilt. You can build on your computer or in your own CI environment, inspect the output, and upload the build artifacts to Vercel without a remote build of your source code.

First, run vercel pull to download the project's settings and environment variables, then build:

terminal
vercel pull --environment=preview
vercel build

Download preview settings and build the project locally.

This produces .vercel/output in the Build Output API format. You can review the output, then deploy with:

terminal
vercel deploy --prebuilt

Deploy the build outputs in .vercel/output produced by vercel build.

Review the When not to use --prebuilt section to understand when you should not use the --prebuilt flag.

See more details at Build Output API.

Last updated September 8, 2026

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