Knowledge > Runbooks > Deployment > Deploy IllustrateTheWord

Deploy IllustrateTheWord to Production

Deploy changes to illustratetheword.com (ITW — sermon illustrations) via Vercel's git-based continuous deployment.

Prerequisites

Create a feature branch from the deploy branch

cd /c/dev/sermon-illustrations
git checkout master && git pull
git checkout -b feat/<short-description>

Note: ITW deploys from master, not main.

Make your changes, then verify the build passes locally
```
pnpm build
```
The build command must be run from C:\dev\sermon-illustrations\ (the project root), not from a subdirectory.

Stage and commit

git add <specific-files>
git commit -m "feat: describe your change"

Push the feature branch

git fetch origin && git pull --rebase
git push -u origin feat/<short-description>

Vercel creates a preview deployment automatically.

Verify the preview deployment
- Test illustration browsing: [preview-url]/illustrations
- Test an illustration detail page: [preview-url]/illustrations/[some-slug]
- Test pricing page: [preview-url]/pricing
- If Supabase Auth is involved, test sign-in and premium content access

Merge to master to trigger production deploy

git checkout master && git pull
git merge feat/<short-description>
git push

Monitor the production deployment

vercel logs --tail --project sermon-illustrations

Smoke test production
- https://illustratetheword.com — homepage loads
- https://illustratetheword.com/illustrations — illustration listing renders
- https://illustratetheword.com/pricing — pricing page shows correct prices
- Sign in with a test account and verify premium content is accessible

vercel ls --project sermon-illustrations

Top entry should show "Production" with status "Ready" and a recent timestamp.

Content lives in Supabase (unified_rag_content table, 327K rows). Deployments do not affect content — content changes are made via scripts in sermon-illustrations/scripts/.
Supabase Auth is used for ITW (unlike PewSearch which uses token-based auth). Test sign-in after any auth-related changes.
dir_illustrations is a view — a read-only snapshot of unified_rag_content. Do not modify directly.
isomorphic-dompurify / jsdom must NOT be used in Vercel serverless — use the blocklist sanitizer for DB content. See feedback_dompurify_serverless.md in agent memory.

If the production deploy is broken, see rollback.md.