Vercel with Xata

Vercel transforms application development for modern developers with efficient workflows through preview deployments.

Xata, using preview branches, a Vercel integration, and an application for GitHub, completes the Vercel workflow by pairing each pull request and Vercel preview with a preview branch of the production database.

The following is an example workflow for adding a star rating to each product review in an e-commerce application.

To get started using example workflow, ensure you sign up and follow the step-by-step instructions to install the GitHub and Vercel integrations.

Start by creating a branch for local development. The xata branch create my_feature creates a new branch off of the main database in Xata.

1. Enter the following commands to checkout a new branch for reviews:

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   git checkout -b review_stars
   xata branch create review_stars

2. Add a new column called review_rating for new review ratings:

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   xata pull review_stars

   xata pull pulls the changes locally, along with a ledger and migration file, to ensure the branch stays in sync with any changes made to main. This mirrors typical Git workflows.

   

1. Add changes and commit your changes to the branch:

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    git add .
    git commit -m 'add rating column to db'

2. Push the changes up to your remote branch and create a pull request:

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   git push --set-upstream origin review_stars

   When the pull request is created, you’ll see a comment with the current state of your preview branch along with the Vercel comment.

   

   Each preview branch will be automatically populated with data from main. In this example, the preview branch includes an empty column for review_ratings. With the integration with Vercel, every preview automatically uses the preview branch from Xata. This provides a secure and isolated environment to iterate and ship with every pull request.

You don't have to worry about migrating any changes. Xata will perform a number of checks with each commit to ensure your pull request does not have any migration errors. In case errors are detected, Xata will provide a comment with details and block the merging of the pull request until the migration failures have been addressed.

On merge, Xata will migrate the schema changes from the preview branch into the main database with zero downtime. The preview branch will automatically be deleted along with the Vercel preview deployment.

Without any changes to your current workflow, you’ve added in an isolated database branch for each preview deployment.