- Published on
How to deploy a single file website to Vercel
No build steps, no 3rd party dependencies, just a single file
- Authors
- Name
- Nico Prananta
- Follow me on Bluesky
Vercel is well known for deploying Next.js apps. But it is less known that it also supports deploying projects from other frameworks like Angular, Solid, Svelte, and many more. Something even more obscure is that you can deploy a single file website to Vercel.
The secret is to use Vercel's Serverless functions. All you have to do is create a file in a directory called api, e.g., api/hello.js. In this file, you need to export a GET function that will be called by Vercel when the user visits the /api/hello endpoint.
export function GET(request) {
return new Response(`Hello from ${process.env.VERCEL_REGION}`);
}
Serving HTML
To show a website in this end point, we need to return a HTML response instead of text response as shown in the example above.
export async function GET() {
const html = `
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Vercel Region</title>
<style>
body {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
min-height: 100vh;
margin: 0;
background-color: #f0f0f0;
}
.container {
text-align: center;
padding: 20px;
background-color: white;
border-radius: 8px;
box-shadow: 0 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);
max-width: 800px;
width: 100%;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<h1>Hello from ${process.env.VERCEL_REGION}</h1>
</body>
</html>
`;
return new Response(html, {
headers: { "Content-Type": "text/html" },
});
}
That's it! Now you just need to deploy the project to Vercel. You can initialize a Git repository and push the code to it then add a project in Vercel that points to the Git repository. Or you can use the Vercel CLI to deploy the project directly.
npx vercel
Once deployed, you can visit the website by visiting the URL of the project in Vercel. For example, if you deployed the project to my-project.vercel.app, you can visit https://my-project.vercel.app/api/hello. If you want to be able to access the website from the root URL, unfortunately we need to add another file called vercel.json to the project.
{
"rewrites": [
{
"source": "/",
"destination": "/api/hello"
}
]
}
Getting Data
Now let's try to serve a more than basic HTML page. Let's display a list of users which are stored in a database in Turso. First, you need to create a database in Turso and get an auth token to access the database by following the quick start guide.
Then let's add a function to the api/hello.js file to fetch the users from the database.
function _getData() {
const url = `${process.env.TORSO_DB_HTTP_URL}/v2/pipeline`;
const authToken = process.env.TORSO_TOKEN;
return fetch(url, {
method: "POST",
headers: {
Authorization: `Bearer ${authToken}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json",
},
body: JSON.stringify({
requests: [
{ type: "execute", stmt: { sql: "SELECT * FROM users" } },
{ type: "close" },
],
}),
})
.then((res) => res.json())
.then((data) => data.results[0].response.result.rows) // [[{"type":"integer","value":"1"},{"type":"text","value":"Nico"}],[{"type":"integer","value":"2"},{"type":"text","value":"Jobs"}]]
.catch((err) => console.log(err));
}
Next we need to update the GET function in the api/hello.js file to fetch the data from the database before returning the HTML response.
export async function GET() {
const data = await _getData();
// Create a formatted table for users
const userTable = `
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>ID</th>
<th>Name</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
${data
.map(
(user) => `
<tr>
<td>${user[0].value}</td>
<td>${user[1].value}</td>
</tr>
`
)
.join("")}
</tbody>
</table>
`;
const html = `
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Vercel Region</title>
<style>
body {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
min-height: 100vh;
margin: 0;
background-color: #f0f0f0;
}
.container {
text-align: center;
padding: 20px;
background-color: white;
border-radius: 8px;
box-shadow: 0 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);
max-width: 800px;
width: 100%;
}
table {
width: 100%;
border-collapse: collapse;
margin-top: 10px;
}
th, td {
padding: 10px;
border: 1px solid #ddd;
}
th {
background-color: #f2f2f2;
font-weight: bold;
}
tr:nth-child(even) {
background-color: #f9f9f9;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<h2>Users</h2>
${userTable}
</div>
</body>
</html>
`;
return new Response(html, {
headers: { "Content-Type": "text/html" },
});
}
We can even add a form to allow visitor to add new users to the database. The complete code is available in my repo.
Conclusion
We often hear people complain that web development has become too complicated. They usually mention how they miss the simplicity of making websites without build steps, without CI/CD, and just uploading files to a server via SFTP. In this post, I want to show these people that it's still possible to deploy a website by uploading it to Vercel directly using the Vercel CLI.
Moreover, if you hate having multiple files in your project and only want to have a single file like that famous million-dollar PHP indie hacker guy (you know who), you can do it too! Well, two files, actually, sorry. But it's still possible.
Bonus:
- Do you know you can even deploy a Python, Ruby, and Go function to Vercel?
- If you're wondering if you should use Vercel, read my article here.
By the way, I'm making a book about Pull Requests Best Practices. Check it out!