Astro + Vercel Serverless API

I recently decided to create a portfolio website and my requirements are pretty simple - I want mostly static content but also dynamic islands here and there. Namely I want to dynamically fetch and display my Dev.to blogposts, and I really don't care how I do it as long as I stay on the cheap side.

Since I mentioned islands, you probably guessed I picked Astro, and since I like using Vercel, I thought I could use an .

Edge Functions didn't work

I found this the hard way. Even though Vercel's docs mention , but I just couldn't.

First of all the vercel cli, which apparently uses and it's easy to set up too. Following the link I had to do these steps:

pnpm astro add vercel

And in my astro.config.ts:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';

// Import /serverless for a Serverless SSR site

import vercelServerless from '@astrojs/vercel/serverless';



export default defineConfig({

  output: 'server', // don't be confused by "server", it's actually serverless

  adapter: vercelServerless(),

});

I was at first spooked by the mentions of SSR in the docs since I thought one needs server for that, but apparently it can be done serverless too nowadays, cool!

And then I could happily define my functions not in /api but in pages like src/pages/blogposts.ts:

export async function GET() {

  const articlesResponse = await fetch("https://dev.to/api/articles/me", {

    headers: {

      "api-key": "[API_KEY]",

    },

  });

  const articles = await articlesResponse.json();



  return Response.json(articles);

}

to which I can the just GET /blogposts and voila, there they are! The bonus is of course that I don't need any server with serverless (duh) and can stay on my Hobby Vercel plan, yay!

Wrap up

Of course I now feel naive that I went for Edge Functions at first because it's a very different thing to Serverless Functions deployment-wise, but the thing is I didn't care; I just wanted some quick and dirty API asap. Me not being very experienced in Astro + Vercel, it took me some time to wrap my head around the Vercel ecosystem and how to put things together so I hope this will help someone struggling with the same thing ❤️.