Deploying to production

Vercel, Render, Fly, AWS — what works out of the box and what to watch out for.

May 7, 2026·1 min read·18 views

Our Next.js templates deploy on any platform that runs Node 20. We test heavily on Vercel and Render.

Vercel

Push the code to a Git repo.
Import the project in Vercel.
Add environment variables (the same set as local).
Vercel runs npm install && npm run build automatically.
Done — you'll get a deploy URL and free TLS.

If your product uses Prisma, add "postinstall": "prisma generate" to package.json so Vercel rebuilds the client on every deploy.

Render / Fly / Railway

All three support Next.js 14 standalone output. Set the build command to npm run build and the start command to npm run start. Configure the same env vars and a Postgres connection string.

Self-hosted (AWS, DigitalOcean, bare metal)

Bring pm2 or systemd to keep the Node process alive. Run behind nginx or a load balancer for TLS. Make sure your NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL matches the public URL the world sees.

Common gotchas

Image domains: add your CDN domain to next.config.mjs → images.remotePatterns.
Database SSL: Neon, Supabase, and most managed Postgres providers require ?sslmode=require in the URL.
Background jobs: serverless platforms shut idle workers down — use a queue or cron service for long-running tasks.

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