A few days ago, I had to map the domain inity.io to a Netlify domain. If you have only worked with DNS once in your life, you probably know about these two types of records:
- A: an A record maps a name to an IP address
- CNAME: a CNAME record maps a name to another name; I can, for instance, create a CNAME record that maps http://www.inity.io to somedomain.netlify.com
With that knowledge in your bag, it would seem that a CNAME record is the way to map inity.io to somedomain.netlify.com. Sadly, that is not the case because CNAMEs cannot coexist with other records for the domain. In the case of the root or apex domain, there are existing records for the root domain such as the NS records.
An ALIAS record is one way of solving the issue. But before reading on, be sure to read this post: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/02/28/to-www-or-not-www/.
ALIAS record to the rescue
If your DNS provider supports ALIAS records, you are in luck. From a high level, an ALIAS record works like a CNAME record although there are several lower level differences we won’t all go into.
Since I use namecheap.com and they support ALIAS records, it was easy to map inity.io to somedomain.netlify.com:
The ALIAS record only supports a 1 or 5 minute TTL. The host is @ which represents the root domain. Notice I also redirect http://www.inity.io to the Netlify domain with a regular CNAME.
What does dig say?
Let’s look at what dig returns for both the ALIAS and CNAME record. Here’s the dig output for ALIAS (with some lines removed):
λ geba:~ dig inity.io ;; ANSWER SECTION: inity.io. 300 IN A 167.99.129.42
The authoritative server does all the work here and returns the IP address directly to you. That does not happen for the CNAME:
λ geba:~ dig www.inity.io ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.inity.io. 1799 IN CNAME optimistic-panini-9caddc.netlify.com. optimistic-panini-9caddc.netlify.com. 20 IN A 167.99.129.42
Some more work needs to be done here since you get back the CNAME record which then needs to be resolved to the IP address.
What about Azure and Front Door?
If you work with Front Door and want to map the root or apex domain to a Front Door frontend such as my.azurefd.net, the same issue arises. The Microsoft docs contain a good article explaining the concepts: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor/front-door-how-to-onboard-apex-domain. From that document, you will learn that Azure DNS also supports “aliases” with an easy dropdown list to select your Front Door frontend host. If you want to use SSL for the frontend host, you will need to bring your own certificate because automatic certificates are not supported with APEX domains.
Note that you do not have to use Azure DNS. An ALIAS record at NameCheap or other providers would work equally well. CloudFlare also supports APEX domains via CNAME Flattening. Just don’t use GoDaddy. 😲
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