The Vercel integration

Connecting Vercel lets you ask nobuu about your deployments in plain language — which build failed and why, what shipped this morning, which projects you have — instead of going and looking.

Connecting it

Vercel is a paste-a-token connection rather than a sign-in button. Vercel only offers its sign-in screen to a short list of desktop apps it has approved, and a website like nobuu cannot be on that list. Tokens are the door that is open to us, and it takes about thirty seconds, once.

• Go to vercel.com/account/tokens and press Create Token. Any name will do.
• Vercel shows you a long code once. Copy it before you leave that page.
• In nobuu, open Connections, press the Vercel tile, paste the code and save.

You connect your own Vercel account. Every person using nobuu connects theirs separately, and one person’s connection is never visible to another.

Rather be walked through it?

Same three steps, done with you instead of by you. Copy this and paste it into a nobuu chat — it will stop after each step and wait. The Vercel tile has a Copy setup prompt button that puts the same text on your clipboard.

You are helping me connect my Vercel account to nobuu.
Walk me through it one step at a time:

1. Open https://vercel.com/account/tokens
2. Create a token, scoped to my team, with an expiry
3. Copy the code (it is shown once)
4. In nobuu: Connections → Vercel → paste → save

Check with me after each step before moving on.

What it can see

nobuu talks to Vercel’s own API at api.vercel.com, using your token. It reads these things and nothing else:

• your teams, so it knows where to look
• your projects — name, framework, when each last changed
• recent deployments — whether each worked, its address, when
• one deployment in detail, including why it failed and which commit it was built from
• a deployment’s build log
• how many requests a project served and how many came back as errors — the counts behind “is it actually working”
• a few seconds of a running deployment’s live log, when you ask it to watch

The commit is shown as its short id with a link to it on GitHub, when Vercel recorded which repository the deploy came from. It never guesses the repository, and it does not read commit messages or branch names — those are written by whoever opened the pull request, not by you.

It is read-only. There is no tool for deploying, deleting, rolling back or changing settings — not a setting you can turn on, but code that was never written.

Your environment variables

This is worth being precise about. When nobuu asks Vercel for your ordinary project list, Vercel also sends back the names of your environment variables, and for variables you created as “plain” it sends the values too. Nobody asked for them; they arrive anyway.

So nobuu throws that whole section away before it reads the reply. It keeps only a short list of fields it names one by one — project name, framework, dates, deployment states — and anything else Vercel sends is discarded, including anything Vercel adds in future.

Where it works

Vercel works in chat and during a /clean run. It is not available in Platform box sessions — those run somewhere else and cannot be handed this kind of connection.

During a /clean run, nobuu deliberately sees less: it can check whether a deployment worked, its address and its timings, but it cannot read build logs or failure messages there. A /clean run is unattended, and text that comes out of a build is text an outside contributor could have written — so it stays in chat, where you are reading along.

Watching a live deployment’s log is chat only, and for a stronger version of the same reason: a line in a running site’s log can be influenced by anyone on the internet who can load a page, not just by someone who can change your code.

The morning check

You can ask nobuu to look at your Vercel account once a day, on the Vercel tile in Connections. It is off until you turn it on, and it uses your own token to check two things: whether any production deploy failed, and whether anything is serving errors.

If something is wrong, it writes it up as a new conversation in your chat list, so it is waiting for you when you next open nobuu and you can ask follow-up questions straight away. If everything is fine it says nothing at all — a daily “all good” is a message people learn to ignore, and then the one morning it does not arrive is the one nobody notices. Every run, quiet or not, is listed on the tile so you can see it is working.

Where the credential lives

Your token is stored on nobuu’s server in a file readable only by the account the server runs as, and kept apart from every other kind of data. It is never sent to your browser and never shown in the app: it is used in one place only, as the sign-in header on requests going out to Vercel, and nothing in nobuu ever prints it.

Disconnecting

Press Disconnect on the Vercel tile in nobuu. The token is deleted immediately and nobuu can no longer reach your account.

To kill it on Vercel’s side as well, delete the token at vercel.com/account/tokens. Deleting it there stops it working everywhere at once, which is the stronger move of the two.

Troubleshooting

• “Your Vercel token is no longer valid” — the token was deleted or expired on Vercel’s side. Make a new one and paste it in again. The tile keeps looking connected until something actually tries to use it, so this is the message you see first.
• It says you have no projects — you almost certainly have more than one Vercel team, and it looked in the wrong one. Ask it to list your teams, then ask again naming the team you meant.
• “Vercel refused that” — the message after it is Vercel’s own words, usually that this token cannot reach that team.

Support

bryan@flowhighlevel.com. See also the privacy policy and the terms of use.