How to Make Your Open Source Project More Attractive? Try Adding Vercel One-Click Deploy
In some well-known GitHub open source projects, you'll find support for Vercel one-click deployment. For example, NextChat, which exploded in popularity two years ago and now has 78.7k stars:
So what is Vercel? It's a modern deployment platform designed specifically for frontend developers, particularly suitable for building, previewing, and deploying static websites and frontend applications.
So, if your open source project is a static website or frontend application, consider adding Vercel one-click deploy to your README.md to increase your project's attractiveness.
Adding one-click deployment is quite simple. Vercel provides a button generator tool: deploy-button
The button generator creates three formats: Markdown, HTML, and URL - you can choose what you need.
Just a heads up, the interaction here might feel a bit odd. The form input is at the bottom of the page. For example, after filling in the Git repository URL, the Markdown link above will automatically change without any success notification. You'll need to get used to this.
The only required field is your Git repository URL:
Other options include environment variables, default project name, redirects, demos, integrations, etc. Fill these as needed, then paste the generated Markdown into your open source project's README.md:
That's the entire process - very simple!
From the user's perspective, when they click the deploy button, they'll be redirected to the Vercel website:
Users need to log in to Vercel, and Vercel will request read/write permissions for Git repositories because Vercel needs to clone the target repository and deploy based on the cloned repository.
Fill in the project name and click create:
Then just wait for completion:
Congratulations!
You can already see the preview screenshot of the successfully running website. You can also click "Continue to Dashboard" to go to the control panel, then click the domain URL to see that the website has been successfully deployed:
Looking back at the whole process, Vercel's deployment service is incredibly smooth. I didn't even need to provide framework information, run commands, etc.
So, if you think Vercel one-click deployment is a good idea, consider adding it to your project!
If needed, you can check out the example project from this article: https://github.com/wukaipeng-dev/ken