The Full Deploy Sequence

Seven prompts, in order, that take the project from your laptop to an address you can send to anyone.

Before you start: free GitHub and Vercel accounts, both created.

Expect ten to fifteen minutes the first time, including the signups and the authorization flows. After this first time, redeploys take seconds. If Claude hits an authentication wall or asks you to pick a branch name, that is normal first-time friction rather than a course problem. Paste the error or the question back to Claude and it walks you through it.

The first deploy of a real project is the messiest one you will ever do. Every deploy after this one is cleaner.

One, version control

I want to get this project ready to put online. Set up git for it, give it a sensible .gitignore for a plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript site, and make the first commit with everything that is in here now.

Claude checks what is already in the folder before it changes anything. If a .gitignore exists it rounds it out for a static site rather than starting over. If not, this same ask writes it fresh.

Two, getting ready for Vercel

I am going to host this on Vercel. It is a static site, plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no build step. Set up whatever configuration it needs, and tell me if you see anything in the project that would trip up the deploy.

The phrase no build step is doing work in that prompt. A build is a preparation step some sites need before going live, where the files a developer wrote get assembled into the final files a browser uses. This site needs none. What you wrote is exactly what the world receives.

Claude starts with the deploy gotchas here, and the classic one it audits is file-name capitalization.

Three, the GitHub CLI

Do I have the GitHub CLI installed? If not, install it for me, and then help me log in to my GitHub account with it.

The login opens your browser for a one-time authorization. That signing-in is the one part only you can do, because it is your account.

Four, the Vercel CLI

Do I have the Vercel CLI? If not, install it for me and check that it works.

The same prompt works whether you have the tool or not. If Claude declines to run the login itself, that is correct rather than a limitation. A login opens a browser and confirms a human, so it hands you the exact command instead.

Some terminal steps Claude can run for you and some it correctly hands back, and you never have to memorise which is which. Ask, and it either does the thing or tells you your part.

Five, the deploy

Deploy this site to Vercel for me using its CLI, and connect it to the GitHub repository so every future push goes live automatically. Walk me through any logins you need along the way.

Claude offers two roads here, the dashboard and the CLI. Plenty of tutorials show you the dashboard clicks. Staying in the conversation is the bigger lesson: once you start using Claude Code, it becomes a new way of using your whole computer, and your mouse sits mostly unemployed.

Six, if the live address is not publicly viewable

Vercel switches on a protection setting by default, so every visitor, including the link previews on LinkedIn and Slack, hits a login wall instead of your portfolio. Claude catches this by checking the live address itself after deploying.

Turning it off is an access decision, so Claude names the problem and offers you both roads rather than flipping it alone.

You do it, and recheck that it is public.

Why let Claude try first? Most of the time it does the job, and when it cannot, it tells you and you take the manual road.

Seven, closing the loose end

The share tags written earlier point at a guessed web address. Now a real one exists.

The site is live now. Update the share tags to use the real deployed URL, then commit and push the change.

Claude flags one detail before touching anything here, and it is the kind of care you want. A contact email can live on a similar-looking name, and it must not change, because an email address is not a website address.

That push does more than save the change. The auto-deploy is watching the repository now, so the live site updates on its own.

One extra, if you use the desktop app

There is a connector for Vercel. Open the connector settings, search for Vercel, connect, and sign in once. From then on Claude can check your deployments and read deploy logs even in future sessions, with nothing to install.

Do not worry about what a connector is under the hood. That gets a whole part of the course later. For today it is one search, one click and one sign-in.

When your link works

Copy that URL and put it where it belongs. Paste it into a message to someone. Drop it into your LinkedIn profile. Add it anywhere people look you up.

You described it in conversation, Claude built the code, and you made the architectural decisions about what to include and what to reject.

This resource is part of

Claude Code: From Beginner to Pro Agentic AI Engineer

by Arun Nagarathanam

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