Run any Dockerfile on Vercel
4 points by Vaelatern
4 points by Vaelatern
Why is the .vercel extension necessary?
Probably just as a marker so that you can have other Dockerfiles in your repo, and not have them interpreted by the Vercel in any way, shape or form :)
Vercel had this feature when they first launched (as Now.sh) and it was amazing. I could deploy any app to Vercel that I could package with Docker. They killed that off back in 2020, which was a real disappointment.
I guess they've figured out an economically sustainable way to offer it again. I doubt they'd ship it a second time if they hadn't figured out the proper model for it.
... and yeah, they talk about that in the post themselves:
Our first platform let you deploy a Dockerfile with a single command. That was a decade ago, and the idea was right, but the infrastructure to make it great didn't exist yet.
We've spent the years since building the primitives to handle it well.