[Blocking] Need Access to vercel team for deployment

[lwasser]

Right now, the all-contributors bot is deployed using Vercel. I see the "approve" deploy button on PRs, but I don't see how to test that things are working, and I don't see that I have access to the Vercel team.

@gerteck mentioned this related to #516 and @JoshuaKGoldberg has some understanding of apps. But without access to the Vercel team, it's hard to understand what Vercel is doing. It's also hard to determine how to test whether updates to the CLI will affect how the bot operates.

My fear is updating the CLI and publishing to npm (we are close there), then updating the bot, and things breaking, and it becoming hard to fix.

I emailed the NPM team about access to NPM and Vercel. They gave us access to NPM, but no one on that team was aware of Vercel or the bot. So the bot must be a newer feature. (newer as in newer than 2020 when that team was active ) 🙃

@gr2m I think you are a super busy human, BUT if you happen to see this and have any thoughts on how we can better understand (and test) deployment of the app here as we update the cli, that would be wonderful. cc @Berkmann18 @JimMadge

This issue is why work has slowed down here in this repo, but we are cruising along in the cli repo towards a fresh npm release ❇️ so project work IS moving forward!!

[JimMadge]

Good to have a plan for this. I think we can continue working on the CLI for now. I think we'd want to be confident we have a release that is working well before trying to update the version used by the app.

Working on my FOSDEM talk I looked into the history of the repos to try and understand the development history and maintainers. IIRC @jakebolam was the person most involved with building the app, and this was a few years after the spec/CLI were first created. That would make align with the earlier maintainers not having access to Vercel.

[lwasser]

@JimMadge, what is curious is that Jake wasn't at all familiar with Vercel. When I emailed the group, Jake responded and said that he was unfamiliar with vercel. I could email them again to see whether the app existed during their tenure and, if so, whether they could help us understand how it was deployed (if it didn't originally use Vercel). I suspect that Gregor might own the account, as maybe Gregor works/worked there?.

I know that probot is involved. And there is some GitHub app stuff too. I see that sometimes I can approve the deployment, but other times it 404s for me when I go to that page. I can't see any info about what's set up on Vercel. But I did find some Probot stuff in our settings.

My concern with the CLI is that if we don't handle errors correctly, it will throw off the bot. But I don't know how to correctly handle errors for a bot. 🙃

we are making great headway on the CLI however so that is good!! tons to do there and all very doable!

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Have you tried asking Vercel support? They've been quite good in the past IIRC.

[lwasser]

@JoshuaKGoldberg good thought!!

I looked for a support email. I initiated something in my Vercel account, but it sent me to an AI chatbot that said that, because I don't have a paid account, they can't help me much further. Did you reach out to them via your account or maybe there is a better way?

Another interesting point is that, since Jake didn't know about Vercel, I wonder whether the app previously worked without Vercel. If that is the case, I could email him and the rest of the team (cc you all here) to see if they can help us fill in some of the missing pieces? 🤷🏻‍♀️

[Berkmann18]

AFAIK, I don't have admin access on Vercel.