Open In App

How to Deploy an Express Application to Vercel ?

Last Updated : 23 Jul, 2025
Comments
Improve
Suggest changes
1 Likes
Like
Report

Vercel is a popular cloud platform that is known for its excellent support in building and deploying scalable Frontend infrastructure. In this article, we will look into how to deploy an Express.js web Application to Vercel. We will use the Serverless computing feature of Vercel to deploy our express.js application.

Prerequisites

  • Node JS & NPM installed
  • An IDE (preferably VS Code)
  • Vercel Account

Approach to deploy Express App to vercel

  • Install the Vercel CLI and log in with your Vercel account.
  • Create an express.js project and export the express app.
  • Configure the vercel.json to redirect the requests to our express app.
  • Deploy the application to Vercel with the Vercel CLI.

Deploying Express Application to Vercel

Step 1: Create a folder for the project and deployment

mkdir deploy_expressjs_vercel
cd deploy_expressjs_vercel

Step 2: Initialized the express application and install express

npm init -y
npm i express

Project Structure

project_structure_deploy_expressjs_vercel
Project structure

The updated dependencies in package.json file will look like : 

"dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.18.2"
}

Step 3: Create a folder structure similar to instructed and add the following files in respective directories.

HTML 
<!-- public/index.html -->

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Welcome</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>This is a express app deployed in vercel</h1>
  </body>
</html>
JavaScript 
// server.js

const express = require("express");
const app = express();

// A simple get greet method
app.get("/greet", (req, res) => {
    // get the passed query
    const { name } = req.query;
    res.send({ msg: `Welcome ${name}!` });
});

// export the app for vercel serverless functions
module.exports = app;
JavaScript 
// /api/index.js

const app = require("../server.js");

module.exports = app;
JavaScript 
// vercel.json

{
    "rewrites": [
        {
            "source": "/(.*)",
            "destination": "/api"
        }
    ]
}

Note:

  • In Vercel, we don't need to call the listen() of express to listen for incoming requests, everything will be internally run by Vercel serverless functions, so we just need to export our express.
  • You don't need to add the below line in the server.js to host the public files from express, vercel will take care of it.
app.use(express.static("public"))
  • The vercel.json redirect every source request to "/api" serverless function where our express is actually exported.

Step 4: Install Vercel CLI & Login

npm install --global vercel
vercel login
vercel whoami

Step 5: Deploy Express App to Vercel by running the following command.

vercel
deploy_project_deploy_expressjs_vercel80q

Incase you need to redeploy after making changes use the vercel command with prod flag.

vercel --prod

Output: Now run the deployed link on the browser.


R

ragul21
Improve
Article Tags :

Explore

Lightbox