Why Vercel blocks some deployments.

The symptom

You push to main, a deployment appears in Vercel and on the GitHub commit, and it fails with a message saying the deployment was blocked. Nothing is wrong with the code, and a deployment started from the Vercel dashboard works fine.

The cause

The Hobby plan is for personal use. For private repositories, Vercel only deploys commits automatically when it can match the commit author to the account owner. If your machine commits under a different email or GitHub account, Vercel treats the commit as someone else's and blocks it.

This happened while moving this site: the repository and Vercel account belonged to one GitHub account, but the computer committed as another. Every push was blocked until the commit author matched.

Check which identity you commit as

git config user.name
git config user.email
git log -3 --format='%h %an <%ae>'

Compare the email with the one on the GitHub account linked to Vercel. GitHub's private noreply address for that account also works.

Ways to fix it

The block is about who made the commit, so the fix is to make commits come from an account Vercel recognises.

1. Set this repository to commit as the account owner: git config user.name and git config user.email inside the project, using the owner's GitHub email or noreply address.
2. Or make your commits from the GitHub account that is linked to your Vercel login.
3. Or, for a team of more than one person, move the project to a Pro team and add each contributor.
4. To unblock right now, push a new commit authored by the owner, or start a deployment from the Vercel dashboard.

# Inside the repository only, not globally
git config user.name "Your Name"
git config user.email "12345678+your-username@users.noreply.github.com"

Confirm it worked

Push a small change and watch the commit status on GitHub or the Deployments tab in Vercel. It should build and go live without the blocked message.