Vercel Preview Deployment

Vercel Preview deployments can build the public source repository and pull the private photo repository during the build. This keeps photo source files out of Jackyhq/Photography while still allowing branch and pull request previews to generate a complete photo manifest.

Repository Configuration

The root vercel.json configures Vercel to use:

{
  "installCommand": "pnpm install",
  "buildCommand": "pnpm run vercel:build",
  "outputDirectory": "apps/web/dist"
}

pnpm run vercel:build performs three steps:

1. pnpm run vercel:photos
2. pnpm run photos:standardize
3. pnpm run build

The vercel:photos script runs scripts/checkout-vercel-photos.sh. In a clean Vercel build environment, it clones Jackyhq/Photography-Photos into ./photos. If ./photos already exists locally, the script leaves it alone.

Environment Variables

Add this Vercel Preview environment variable:

• PHOTO_REPO_TOKEN: fine-grained GitHub PAT with read-only Contents access to Jackyhq/Photography-Photos.

Mark the variable as Sensitive in Vercel. The token is only needed at build time and should not be exposed to client-side code.

Behavior

Vercel Preview builds do not push standardized photo changes back to Jackyhq/Photography-Photos, do not sync Cloudflare R2, and do not mirror production output into Jackyhq/Photography-Web. They only build the static preview artifact in apps/web/dist/.

The generated manifest still uses the configured public photo base URL:

https://photos3.jackyw.cn/photos/

That means the preview expects published photo objects to already be available in Cloudflare R2.

Pull Request Safety

For trusted branches and trusted pull requests, Vercel can use PHOTO_REPO_TOKEN to build previews automatically. For public fork pull requests, only authorize Vercel deployments from people you trust. A fork PR can change build scripts, and any build that receives a private token should be treated as trusted code execution.