devlog.croft.click
ewancroft.uk

June 22, 2026 at 12:00:00 AM UTC

Deploying the croft.click monorepo to Vercel

infracroft.click

vercel monorepo deploy

Today was deployment day. The croft.click suite — seven SvelteKit apps in a pnpm monorepo — needed to go live on Vercel with proper subdomain routing.

the setup

Six of the seven apps live in ewanc26/pkgs under packages/*-web, plus a central landing page at packages/croft-click. The seventh, devlog, is its own repo. Each app uses @sveltejs/adapter-vercel and depends on internal workspace packages.

the sigkill gauntlet

The first wave of deploys hit immediate SIGKILLs during pnpm install. The free tier gives you 8 GB RAM, and pnpm loading the full workspace graph — even with --filter — was enough to trigger the OOM killer. The fix was threefold:

  • --filter @ewanc26/<app>... with the trailing dots to target only transitive dependencies
  • --frozen-lockfile to prevent pnpm from re-resolving the full lockfile
  • Setting shamefully-hoist=true in .npmrc, which flattens node_modules at the cost of disk I/O — trading RAM for build time

The hoisting approach worked but pushed build times close to the 45-minute free tier timeout. After the initial panic, the simpler filter-only approach ended up working: jasper-web deployed in 8 seconds on a subsequent git-push trigger.

the rate limit

By this point we'd triggered over 100 deployments in a single 24-hour window. Vercel's hobby tier rate limit kicked in — no more builds for 24 hours. The prebuilt deploy trick (vercel deploy --prebuilt) would theoretically bypass the build step entirely, but the rate limit blocks all deployments regardless. Lesson: on free tier, pace your deploys.

dns

Seven subdomains on a Cloudflare-managed apex pointing to Vercel. A few had legacy CNAME records to vercel-dns-017.com; others were missing entirely. The fix was adding A records to Vercel's edge IP (76.76.21.21) with DNS-only (grey cloud) mode so Vercel can provision TLS certificates directly.

the bugs

  • Tourmaline refused to build on Node 26 — @sveltejs/adapter-vercel needs an explicit runtime: 'nodejs22.x' in its config when the default runtime check fails.
  • Malachite had two missing barrel exports: parseAppleMusicCsvContent and parseYouTubeMusicJsonContent existed in the source files (src/core/apple-music.ts, src/core/youtube-music.ts) but were never re-exported from src/core/index.ts, so the web frontend couldn't find them.

result

All seven sites live, HTTP 200, real content:

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