How to alias a preview deployment using the CLI

Learn how to automatically alias a Vercel preview deployment.

Avatar for leerobLee RobinsonVP of Developer Experience
Guides/Build, Deployment & Git
1 min read
Last updated March 16, 2023

You can use Vercel CLI to create Preview Deployments and can also use the Vercel CLI to alias a URL to that deployment. Each preview deployment has a unique URL. The latest Preview Deployment is automatically aliased to a URL, ensuring you'll have a stable URL pointing to the last Preview Deployment.

This covers adding another URL to the Deployment using the alias command. In this example we use the Vercel CLI to do a deployment using the vercel deploy command. A successful deployment writes the deployed URL to the Standard Output so you can use it in later commands.

As an example:

url="$(vercel deploy)"
vercel alias set "$url" your-alias.app
Bash to deploy and then alias a URL to that Preview Deployment.

In this article we cover how to deploy using GitHub Actions. We can expand that example and alter the last couple of lines to do that auto-aliasing.

To set this Action up, please refer back to the original article. Then change the last lines as below:

name: Vercel Preview Deployment
env:
  VERCEL_ORG_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_ORG_ID }}
  VERCEL_PROJECT_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_PROJECT_ID }}
on:
  push:
    branches-ignore:
      - main
jobs:
  Deploy-Preview:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Install Vercel CLI
        run: npm install --global vercel@latest
      - name: Pull Vercel Environment Information
        run: vercel pull --yes --environment=preview --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
      - name: Build Project Artifacts
        run: vercel build --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
      - name: Deploy Project Artifacts to Vercel
        run: |
          url="$(vercel deploy --prebuilt --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }})"
          vercel alias --token=${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }} set "$url" your-alias.app
A GitHub Action to create a Vercel Preview Deployment and Alias a URL to it.

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