Serverless Content Sync: How I Made SQLite Survive Vercel Cold Starts

Vercel's /tmp is ephemeral — every cold start wipes your SQLite database. I bridged the gap using GitHub as a durable store with the Contents API.

The problem Serverless functions are stateless. SQLite needs a filesystem. On Vercel, /tmp gets wiped on every cold start.

The solution Use GitHub's Contents API as the durable store. Sync in on cold start, sync out after writes.

// sync: GitHub → SQLite on every cold start
await syncFromGitHub();
const content = getPublishedContent();
// ... serve the request
// sync: SQLite → GitHub after every write
await syncToGitHub();

The tradeoff Latency goes up slightly on cold starts. Durability goes up massively. No extra infrastructure.