deploy-pilot

What This Skill Does

The Deploy Pilot skill transforms your OpenClaw agent into a high-precision DevOps engineer. It is designed to bridge the gap between local development and production environments by automating the entire deployment lifecycle of Next.js applications on Vercel. Unlike simple scripts, Deploy Pilot enforces a mandatory Planning Protocol that ensures every code change is validated for technical integrity, environmental safety, and risk assessment before any production traffic is touched. It acts as a safety guardrail, running the complete pre-deployment suite—TypeScript compilation, linting, unit tests, and production build generation—ensuring that you never push broken code to your users.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub command within your OpenClaw terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/guifav/deploy-pilot. Ensure you have the VERCEL_TOKEN environment variable configured in your OpenClaw session settings, as this is required for the agent to interface with the Vercel API, monitor deployments, and verify health statuses.

Use Cases

• Continuous Integration/Deployment: Automating the transition from a local feature branch to a live, production-ready preview URL.
• Risk Mitigation: Identifying potential issues such as incompatible database schema migrations or missing environment variables before they cause downtime.
• Standardized Workflows: Ensuring that every team member follows the same rigorous pre-deployment checks (TSC, Lint, Vitest, and Build) consistently every time.
• Health Monitoring: Automatically confirming that the deployment was successful by querying internal API health check endpoints.

Example Prompts

1. "I've finished the authentication update on the auth-refactor branch. Please run the deploy-pilot protocol to push this to production."
2. "Check the current build status for our staging environment and verify that the API is responding to health checks."
3. "I need to deploy the latest landing page changes. Can you run the pre-deploy checklist and summarize the risks before pushing?"

Tips & Limitations

• Always Honor the Protocol: The agent is hard-coded to require the Planning Protocol. Do not attempt to bypass it; these checks are vital to preventing downtime.
• Environment Variables: Ensure all secrets and environment variables required for your Next.js app are already defined in the Vercel project settings, as the agent cannot automatically provision them.
• Database Safety: While this skill handles the deployment, it is not a database migration tool. Always verify that your database schema changes are applied safely before initiating the deployment flow.