Deployment

Acolyte is optimized for Vercel and other serverless platforms. The only piece that needs special attention is the Accessibility Checker, which runs a headless browser.

Vercel (recommended)

No special configuration is required.

1. Connect the repository to Vercel.
2. Vercel detects Next.js and builds with npm run build.
3. Deploy.

The @sparticuz/chromium package provides a serverless-optimized Chromium binary that the Accessibility Checker uses automatically in production.

Headless browser (Accessibility Checker)

The checker detects its environment:

• Development — uses your local Chrome installation.
• Production / serverless — uses the bundled @sparticuz/chromium binary.

Local development override

If Chrome is installed in a non-standard location, set:

PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=/path/to/your/chrome

OS	Typical path
macOS	/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome
Linux	/usr/bin/google-chrome
Windows	C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

Testing the serverless path locally

NODE_ENV=production npm run dev

This forces use of the serverless Chromium binary instead of local Chrome.

Other platforms

The same configuration works on AWS Lambda, Netlify Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. For the Accessibility Checker, ensure:

• Function timeout is at least 30 seconds (the free Vercel tier defaults to ~10s).
• Memory is at least 1 GB — Chromium is memory-hungry.

Docker

When deploying with Docker, install Chromium in the image and point Puppeteer at it:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    chromium \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

ENV PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH=/usr/bin/chromium

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause & fix
Accessibility scan times out	Increase the serverless function timeout (≥30s).
Out-of-memory during scan	Allocate at least 1 GB of memory to the function.
@sparticuz/chromium not found at build	Confirm it's in dependencies (not devDependencies).

Performance considerations

• Each accessibility scan launches a fresh browser instance — this is inherently resource-intensive.
• Consider rate-limiting the accessibility endpoint and caching results where possible.

tip

This page covers deploying the Acolyte app. To deploy this documentation site, see the docs CI/CD workflow, which publishes to GitHub Pages automatically on changes to docs/.