Code Dungeon · The User Guide

Chapter VIII

Shipping your app

Shipping is putting a chamber's app on the internet, on Vercel. The SHIP IT sign on a chamber's far wall shows where it stands; press E on it (or Ship on the chamber's row in the ledger) to open the panel. Only you ship: coders and testers never deploy.

Setting a chamber up

The first time, the panel asks how this chamber ships and which Vercel project it uses (it can create one named after the repo). It uses the Vercel command line on this machine, logged in as you; if it isn't, run vercel login in a terminal and press Check.

  • Every merge goes live: Vercel builds from GitHub and each merge to main goes live by itself. The way to start: the app lives on its free vercel.app address while it's being built.
  • GitHub builds, you ship: every merge is built but held back. Ship it puts the newest build of main live in seconds.
  • Deploy from the dungeon: the dungeon deploys main itself when you press Ship it, and Preview gives you a link to a test copy.

Launching

When the app is ready, Launch gives it its own address, such as myapp.example.com (set your own domain in the ledger's Settings and Launch suggests one under it), and from then on merges wait for Ship it instead of going live by themselves. The first ship of any chamber asks you first, because it makes the app public.

What the panel shows

  • Live now: the address, the commit, and since when.
  • Waiting to ship: the pull requests merged since then.
  • Ship it stays greyed out, with the reason, while main's checks fail, while Vercel is still building, or when nothing is waiting.
  • Ship log: who shipped what, and when.

Undo

Undo last ship puts the previous version back live in seconds (Go back to… reaches older ones). main still has the change that broke it, so Ship it stays locked until main moves on, and a chamber where every merge goes live pauses until you press Resume. Two buttons follow up: Revert those changes files an issue for a coder to undo them, and Fix it forward files one to fix what broke. Either way the fix goes through QA like any other work.