Introducing Orbit by AppUo: The Missing Identity Manager for Vercel

If you're a developer working with Vercel, you know the drill. You're deploying a personal project, and everything is great. Then, you need to ship a hotfix for your company's production app.

So you run:

vercel logout
vercel login
# (Go through the browser auth flow...)
# (Authorize...)
# (Back to terminal...)
vercel deploy

Ten minutes later, you switch back to your side project. vercel logout. vercel login. Repeat ad infinitum.

At AppUo NextGen Technologies, we believe developer friction is the enemy of shipment velocity. We built Orbit to kill this friction once and for all.

What is Orbit by AppUo?

Orbit by AppUo is an open-source CLI tool that adds named profiles to the Vercel CLI. It allows you to store multiple authentication states securely and switch between them instantly, without ever logging out or re-authenticating.

If you've used aws configure --profile, you already know how this works. But uniquely for Vercel, Orbit manages the underlying auth files directly, meaning you don't need to wrap every command. You just switch your context, and the native vercel command just works.

# Add your profiles once
orbit add vercel personal
orbit add vercel work

# Switch context instantly
orbit use vercel work
vercel deploy # Deploys to work account

orbit use vercel personal
vercel deploy # Deploys to personal account

How It Works: No Shell Hacks

We built Orbit with a strict philosophy: Zero Shell Pollution.

Many "environment managers" work by injecting shell aliases, modifying your .bashrc, or wrapping the binary (e.g., v-cli deploy). We hate that. It breaks autocomplete, it breaks CI scripts, and it's fragile.

Orbit works at the filesystem level. When you run orbit use, it automates the atomic swapping of Vercel's auth.json file.

1. It snapshots your current auth state into an encrypted vault.
2. It restores the target profile's auth state to the default Vercel configuration path.

This means to the Vercel CLI, nothing has changed. It just sees a valid login. This approach ensures 100% compatibility with every Vercel command, plugin, and script.

Why Open Source?

At AppUo, we believe that developer tooling should be shared, not siloed. We built Orbit because we needed it, but we open-sourced it because we knew you needed it too.

When tools are locked behind closed doors, innovation stagnates. By releasing Orbit under the MIT license, we are inviting the community to audit our security, contribute new providers (AWS, Netlify, and Cloudflare are on our roadmap), and make the Vercel ecosystem better for everyone.

We manage dozens of projects across multiple Vercel teams—internal products, client deployments, and open-source experiments. The context switching tax was real for us, and we know it's real for thousands of other developers. Solving this problem for ourselves was good; solving it for the community is better.

Security First by Design

Handling authentication tokens requires paranoia. We didn't just dump tokens into a plaintext JSON file. Orbit implements robust security measures:

• AES-256-GCM Encryption: All tokens are encrypted at rest.
• Strict Permissions: The credential store is enforced at chmod 600 (read/write only by owner).
• No Plaintext Configs: Even profile names are separated from secrets.
• Corruption Recovery: Automatic quarantine mechanisms for corrupted config files.

Orbit Cheatsheet

Here are the commands you'll use most often:

# Add a new profile
orbit add vercel 

# Switch to a profile
orbit use vercel 

# List all configured profiles
orbit list

# Run a command in a specific profile without switching
orbit run vercel  
# Example: orbit run vercel work "vercel ls"

# See which profile is currently active
orbit current

Get Started

Orbit is open source and available today via npm.

npm install -g @appuo/orbit

Or if you prefer pnpm:

pnpm add -g @appuo/orbit

Check out the source code, roadmap, and contribute on GitHub:

Stop logging out. Start Orbiting.