Gitea + Drone CI + Vercel = Gitea Pages

Welcome! So this article comes after a year of being annoyed, but lazy, about the lack of functionality within Gitea to produce something similar to GitHub Pages. About a week ago, I finally got fed up and decided to figure it out and put this knowledge online since no one else has written about this and that’s frustrating. After following the steps below, you’ll be able to deploy your static-generated websites from any framework of your choosing (Vue, React, Svelte, Hugo, …) by simply pushing your code to Gitea.

Setup

This tutorial assumes a couple of things:

• You have basic computer literacy

• You have both a working Gitea server as well as a Drone CI server.

• You have a repository on your Gitea server that has all of your code ready to be deployed

If you don’t have a Gitea or Drone CI server, check out my other post on how to host these for free. Or click the links below because no one likes extra work.
Hosting Gitea on Google Cloud Platform
How to Install Drone CI for Gitea

Vercel Setup

1. Make an account at https://vercel.com

2. Go to https://vercel.com/account/tokens

3. Click on the Create button, then enter “Drone” as the token name

4. Click Create Token and save the code that is given to you. We will need this for later and Vercel will not show it again.

5. Click Done and continue on.

Drone CI Setup

1. Open Drone and open the repository you want to use

2. Click Activate Repository

3. Click Settings

4. Go to the Secrets section and add a new secret. Name it “NOW_TOKEN”, and give it the value of the token we got from the Vercel setup.

5. Click ADD A SECRET to save it

Gitea Setup

In the root of your project, create a file called “.drone.yml”. The contents of which should be as follows:

Deployment Settings

secret: required. Don’t touch this either
deploy_name: Change to what you want your Vercel project name to be
prod: Leave this if you want a production build. If you want development builds, remove this line
directory: Only use this if you pre-compiled your code. If not, remove this line

Push the changes to your repository.

Fixing Vercel

Now that you’ve pushed your code, a Drone runner should have pushed your code to Vercel! Fantastic!

Next comes fixing the issues. Vercel may or may not detect your framework correctly. If you go to your dashboard and your project is there, check the link to see if everything worked correctly. If it did, fantastic! You’ve done everything correctly and there is nothing left to setup. Either check out the Extras section below for some cool stuff or continue writing your code! Enjoy!

If Vercel did not detect your framework, follow these steps:

1. Open your project in Vercel by clicking its name

2. Click Settings in the top left

3. Under Build & Development Settings, chose your framework preset. If it’s not listed, chose Other

4. If the build, output, or development commands listed aren’t correct, click the Override toggle and manually edit the command

5. Click Save and push your code to Gitea once more. This should fix the issues

Extras

If you want to only update production when you push to master, check out the gist below:

Every branch that isn’t master will push to dev builds and master will now push to production!