Building a Git based hosting platform like Vercel

All code lives at https://github.com/luigimorel/opendeploy

If you are a developer, you’ve probably deployed a website by just performing a git push. It just works with no fuss.

I want to understand the complexity involved and the problems that one would have to solve to get such a platform up and running. The goal is not to end up with a production ready set of features, but rather a good enough demo whose concepts can actually be relied upon to build something substantial.

Here’s a little “Product Requirements Document” (PRD) that I will be following:

• Connect a Git repository and configure deployment settings.
• Trigger deployments automatically on every push to a configured branch.
• Build projects in isolated environments with support for common frameworks.
• Store and serve build artifacts over HTTP.
• Assign each project a public URL with support for custom domains.
• Track deployment status and expose build logs for debugging.
• Support deployment history, including the ability to roll back to a previous successful deployment.
• Handle build failures, concurrent deployments, and resource cleanup reliably.
• Manage environment variables and secrets securely during builds and runtime.
• Route incoming requests to the correct deployment and support HTTPS.