Production & Vercel Deployment Skill

Environment strategy

• Three environments minimum: Development (local), Preview (auto-deployed per PR/branch on Vercel), Production (main branch).
• Environment variables scoped per environment in Vercel's dashboard — never share production secrets (payment keys, DB URLs) into Preview; use test/sandbox credentials for Preview so PR previews can't touch real customer data.
• Validate required env vars at build/boot time with a schema (config/env.ts + zod) — fail loudly at build time, not with a runtime crash in production.

Pre-launch production readiness checklist

• All secrets in environment variables, none hardcoded or committed
• Error tracking configured (Sentry or similar) and verified to actually capture a test error
• Database connection pooling configured correctly for serverless (see note below)
• Custom domain + SSL configured, www vs apex redirect decided and consistent
• robots.txt/sitemap configured correctly (don't accidentally block indexing on production while it was fine to block on preview)
• Payment webhooks pointed at the production URL with production signing secrets (see payment-gateway-integration skill)
• Rate limiting / abuse protection on public API routes and auth endpoints