Connect Vercel and Neon manually

• When to use manual connections over integrations
• How to connect using environment variables
• Advanced CI/CD automation options

• Vercel-Managed Integration
• Neon-Managed Integration
• Automate branching with GitHub Actions

Choose manual connection if you prefer not to install a Marketplace integration. This approach is ideal when you:

• Deploy via a custom pipeline (self-hosted CI, monorepo, etc.)
• Need non-Vercel hosting (for example Cloudflare Workers + Vercel Functions hybrid)
• Want full control over branch naming, seeding, migration, or teardown

If you simply want Neon and Vercel with minimal setup, stick to the managed integrations. They're simpler and include UI support.

• Neon project with database (get a connection string via Connect in the Console)
• Deployed Vercel project

1. Copy the connection string from the Neon Console. Click Connect in the Console nav, select the branch, role, and database you want, then copy the Connection string.

   

   For example:

   postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname?sslmode=require&channel_binding=require
                ^              ^                                               ^
                |- <role>      |- <hostname>                                   |- <database>

2. In the Vercel dashboard, open your project and navigate to Settings → Environment Variables.

3. Add either:

   Key: DATABASE_URL
   Value: <your connection string>

   or the granular PG* variables:

   PGUSER=alex
   PGHOST=ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech
   PGDATABASE=dbname
   PGPASSWORD=AbC123dEf
   PGPORT=5432

4. Select which environments need database access (Production, Preview, Development) and click Save.

5. Redeploy your application (or wait for your next deployment) for the variables to take effect.

That's it. Your Vercel app now connects to Neon just like any other Postgres database.

Looking for a full CI/CD recipe? See Automate branching with GitHub Actions.

Join our Discord Server to ask questions or see what others are doing with Neon. For paid plan support options, see Support.