Let's talk about deploying your backend
to Vercel. So, Vercel is a frontend cloud, which means that we integrate with all
of the popular front end frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, or SvelteKit. But that doesn't
mean that we don't support running backend code. Some of these frontend frameworks
work across the client and the server, so you're able to have API routes or
you're able to server-render pages. But when we talk about backends,
or traditional backends, usually we think of something that's maybe just an API
or something that's talking to a database. And you can also run those workloads on Vercel.
So, let's take a look. We have a handful of templates that you can get started from. The
one I'm going to show today is just a simple Node.js-based function for your backend. We
also have a template for Fastify and some other backend tools. You can also use something
like Express if you wanted to, but in general, you're thinking about the way you write your
backend just a little bit differently on Vercel. And I'm going to show exactly what this looks
like. So, I'm going to hit 'Deploy' from here, and inside of my Git repository,
which we've already connected to, it's going to create this new repository
here: nodejs-serverless-function-express. We're going to make this private.
It's going to deploy to my account. And what this is going to do is make a
new API endpoint for my application. So, it's going to download this code, it's going
to kick off this build, and then upload that new API endpoint to a unique URL that I'm going
to get and be able to access over the internet. Now, this is using Node.js, so I can use all
the latest Node.js features. I can talk to my database, I can connect to external services,
I can run some potentially long jobs, up to 5 minutes on Pro. I can stream something back from
my AI provider. All of that is possible here. So now, if I click out into my new URL and
I go to /hello, we see our brand new Node.js function. Now, this is just a backend
API. We could talk to our database here, we can return back some JSON, some XML, some text
files. We can really do whatever we want here. Now, typically with a lot of these backend
JavaScript frameworks like Express, for example, you can define a bunch of different routes
in your application in this one file. So, /api or /api/some-parameterized-slug. I
think Fastify is, you know, kind of also similar like this. You can absolutely still
use some of these backend frameworks in this way by essentially rewriting request from this
incoming route to this file that we've created here inside of our API folder, which is part of
that example that we cloned. But you can also do it in a way where you have different files
for each different API. So, I have /api/hello, I have /api/user. You can just drop those
files in a folder, and they'll work with Vercel whether you want to use a framework
or you want to do something separately. And once you've got that bit of backend logic
that you can use to make a REST API or really do anything on your backend, you could pull from
a blob store and get back some images that are stored in one of your stores, for example.
Here, I've got an image here. You could read from Edge Config, where you can put your critical
redirects for your application, or other kind of structured JSON data. Or you could even go
look at all the logs for your application. So here, I have all of the requests
that I've made to this /hello. So, I see this 200, and I see some 304s here,
and I can see the exact request that I made, the runtime, the location, everything
that happened inside of here. So, you can get pretty detailed with the
metrics that you want to here as well. If you do want to explore other frameworks that
might have some backend functionality built in, on our templates page, we have a bunch of
different frameworks listed here. You can even deploy Python functions to Vercel as
well, too. So maybe you want to use Flask or Django or some of these other things.
We have a whole bunch of examples here. So, in general, Vercel tries to make it
as easy as possible for you to take code, whether it's functions that you've
written or your frontend framework, and get it online as quickly as possible. All right, so that's how you can build your
backend on Vercel by writing API functions or using some frameworks that allow you to
integrate with your backend. If you want to see more videos going further in-depth into
writing standalone APIs or backends on Vercel, let me know, and I can make
more content here. Peace!
