Changelog

URLs are becoming consistent

A lot of feedback we've gathered has shown that the URLs Vercel currently provides you with are too complicated. As part of our strategy for making them simpler, we're starting with applying a consistent format on February 20th 2021:

• Custom Domains and Automatic URLs ending in now.sh will instead end in vercel.app.
• Automatic Deployment URLs like project-d418mhwf5.vercel.app will gain the slug of the owner Vercel scope to match Automatic Branch URLs: project-d418mhwf5-team.vercel.app.
• Automatic Branch URLs like project-git-update.team.vercel.app will lose their second subdomain level in favor of a dash: project-git-update-team.vercel.app.
• Automatic Project URLs like project.team.vercel.app and Automatic Team Member URLs like project-user.team.vercel.app will be adjusted like Automatic Branch URLs.

It is recommended to not rely on any of the Automatic URLs for Production use cases and instead use Custom Domains for that. If that's not possible, please ensure any program sending requests to these URLs supports 308 redirects – like modern browsers do.

Serverless Functions are now deployed to US East by default

Many Serverless Functions communicate with third-party services. Because most of these services are available in the US East region, deploying Serverless Functions to US West leads to slower response times.

For that reason (and to decrease the latency for requests arriving from Europe), newly created projects will default to the US East region (Washington, D.C., USA) instead of US West (San Francisco, USA) when deploying Serverless Functions.

Existing projects will be unaffected, but can be switched to the new default from the new "Serverless Functions" page in the Project Settings.

Check out the documentation as well.

Failed payments can now be retried

If a payment had failed for your Team because of an issue with your payment method, you previously had to reach out to our Support Team and ask them to retry it, so that you could create Deployments again.

Since that's quite a slow process, we instead added a button to the Billing page in your Team Settings that you can click to immediately issue a new charge. If that charge succeeds, your Team will be able to create Deployments again right after.

Changing the payment method will automatically issue a charge too, so this button is particularily helpful if you've fixed an issue with an existing payment method.

Listing the content of directories can now be toggled

Until now, directories used to list the directory's contents whenever their path was visited (provided they didn't contain an index file).

In cases where this was considered a security issue, turning off the Directory Listing required configuring a rewrite rule in vercel.json.

As of today, the Directory Listing is disabled for all newly created Projects and can be toggled on the "Advanced" page in the Project Settings.

Check out the documentation as well.

Git repositories can now be searched for and imported easily

Importing a Git repository into Vercel used to require navigating to it on the Git provider of your choice, copying its URL from the address bar, pasting it in the project creation flow on Vercel and then following the steps.

Thanks to its most recent update, however, the project creation flow now renders a list of recommended Git repositories to import and allows for searching for a particular one as well, annotated with icons for the frameworks that are being used within those Git repositories.

Cloning a Template is now also much easier than before, as they are presented on the same page as the recommended Git repositories.

Check out the documentation as well.

Multiple Git namespaces per Personal Account and Team

When connecting a Project on Vercel to a Git repository, the Git repository previously had to be located in the same Git scope as the Git repositories of all other Projects within that Personal Account or Team.

Now that this connection is defined on the Project-level (see above) instead of being configured on the Personal Account or Team, this limitation is lifted. Additionally, problems with an active connection are now surfaced there too.

Every Personal Account or Team can now contain Vercel Projects that are connected to Git repositories located in various different Git scopes. This also means that, when importing one, Vercel no longer forces a certain destination Personal Account or Team.

Check out the documentation as well.

Environment Variables can now be filtered

Previously, Environment Variables defined in the Project Settings used to be sharded into different Environments using tabs in the UI. To make it easier to add them to multiple Environments at once and edit them like that, however, they now live in a single list.

In order to make it easy for you to still only view the Environment Variables you're interested in, we just added a new search field and a select field on the right that lets you filter the Environment Variables down to a specific Environment.

Build and Function Logs now render ANSI color codes nicely

If the logs that your source code or your framework are exposing within the Build Step or within your Serverless Functions contain ANSI color codes for providing more clarity, Vercel previously directly printed them out in the respective views on the Dashboard.

As of today, however, all of those codes are automatically parsed within the Deployment View, which contains Build Logs on the main page, but also the logs for your Serverless Functions on the "Functions" tab.

In the example above, you can see that ANSI codes are now automatically rendered as the colors they are supposed to represent, which makes the text much easier to understand.

System Environment Variables are now available by default

Previously, consuming values provided by the Vercel platform in your Environment Variables (like the URL of your Deployment) required adding System Environment Variables using the "Environment Variables" page in the Project Settings.

All new Projects created as of today, however, will automatically receive all System Environment Variables by default – without you having to expose them explicitly.

This setting can also be controlled from existing Projects, which means that you can easily opt into the new behavior for those as well.

Furthermore, the available System Environment Variables were revamped to have much more straightforward names and don't differentiate between Git providers anymore. For example, you can now use VERCEL_GIT_COMMIT_REF to retrieve the Git commit SHA for GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket instead of having to use several different System Environment Variables for that.

Check out the documentation as well.

Projects can now be renamed

For all the Projects you've deployed on Vercel in the past, the platform either automatically selected a name for you based on the name of your Git repository or local directory, or you manually customized it before the Project was created.

Previously, it wasn't possible to change the name of a Project after it was created. As of today, however, you can do it directly from the "General" page in the Project Settings.

When changing the name of your Project, no interruptions in your or your Team's workflow will occur, considering that you're either deploying from a Git repository or you've linked the Project to a local directory using Vercel CLI.

Check out the documentation as well.

Dependencies can now be installed with a custom command

By default, Vercel automatically determines the right command for installing your project's code dependencies in the Build Step based on the Framework Preset configured for your project and the presence of certain files (like package-lock.json) in your source code.

As of today, you can customize the command that Vercel will run within the Build Step for installing your code dependencies.

In the new Install Command section within the Project Settings, you can now enter any command of your choice that will be run instead of having Vercel automatically determine the right one for you.

Check out the documentation as well.

Auto Renewal can now be disabled for Domains

Once you've purchased a Domain with Vercel or transferred it in from a different platform, Vercel will automatically make sure that your Domain is renewed every year – before it expires.

Like this, you never have to worry about your projects becoming unavailable. Instead, you will automatically be charged the renewal fee every year and your Domain will continue working.

Previously, the only way to prevent a Domain from being renewed again (in the case that you don't want to continue using it, for example) was contacting our Support Team, who disabled auto renewal for you.

As of today, you can toggle the auto renewal behavior of a Domain right on the Dashboard by navigating to the "Domains" tab on your Personal Account or Team, clicking the Domain you're interested in and toggling the option on the top right.

Check out the documentation as well.