Handling migrations on local vs Vercel

[w3jerry]

Hello everyone,
I've spent the past 2 days trying to understand Payload's migrations and I couldn't seem to figure it out. Any help would be appreciated, or perhaps a paid-for consultation. Thank you in advance.

My current environments

Local

• Nextjs 15.1, Payloadcms 3.31.0 (all other plugins on the same version)
• Postgres database running in docker (push mode, so changes are reflected automagically)

Stage

• Deployed on Vercel
• Using postgres database from Supabase connected directly

Prod
In progress but will be:

• Deployed on Vercel
• Neon serverless postgres database

The problem

Developing on local environment works perfectly. I make a bunch of changes, they are handled by payload and it works nice and smooth. When I am done with local development, I create migrations via:
payload migrate:create -> This creates migrations which I then push into the desired branch

When deployed to Vercel, my ci pipeline starts:
payload migrate && pnpm build

Then, one of the two following issues happens:

1. I get a notification that I have run payload in development mode:
   ? It looks like you've run Payload in dev mode, meaning you've dynamically pushed changes to your database. and the build process gets stuck. - Since it's a build log, I can not interact with it.
2. I get a type error
   17:11:33.673] Types of property 'down' are incompatible. [17:11:33.673] Type 'typeof import("/vercel/path0/migrations/20250403_144756")' is not assignable to type '(args: MigrateDownArgs) => Promise<void>'. [17:11:33.673] Type 'typeof import("/vercel/path0/migrations/20250403_144756")' provides no match for the signature '(args: MigrateDownArgs): Promise<void>'.

Has anyone ever experienced this behavior or is it a misunderstanding on my end? Any help would be appreciated, I can share any additional files and information.

Thank you in advance for any help.