What I learned deploying my first app

Sample post — replace me in the editor.

I finally pushed a side project to a real URL this week. It took three evenings, and almost none of that time was spent on code.

Environment variables are not optional

Locally everything read from a .env file. In production, nothing did — because I never told the host about them.

# what I should have done on day one
vercel env add DATABASE_URL production
vercel env add API_KEY production

Builds are stricter than dev

next dev forgave a type error that next build did not. Now I run the production build before every push.

What I would do next time

• Deploy on day one, even if the page is empty.
• Keep a checklist of every secret the app needs.
• Read the build log top to bottom, not just the last line.