I have configured the App Engine to use a custom domain that I have on CloudFlare. I added the TXT record for verification and all the A and AAAA entries with the given IP addresses.
I have also added 2 CNAME entries that matches the name of 2 services that I have deployed (web and api). I have done this on App Engine settings and in the CloudFlare dashboard.
When I try to go to web.mydomain.com or api.mydomain.com on both cases rather than seeing the content I receive a text response showing a list of IP addresses, and the content served by the Google Frontend (according to the response headers).
Is there any additional configuration I need to do for this to work?
Both services works fine if I access them using the default domain provided by Google (appspot.com)
Thanks!
It turned out that I had to deploy the dispatch.yml file in order for this to work
dispatch:
- url: "api.mydomain.com/*"
service: api
- url: "web.mydomain.com/*"
service: web
I am running a flask application on Google App Engine Standard.
I have not found a resource which states that Google App Engine provides a static IP address. I am trying to route my domain name, let's call it 'mydomain.com' to hit the google app engine endpoint, which Goole provides as something similar to https://my-appengine-name.appspot.com/
I have verified the domain with Google and selected it as a custom domain.
If https://my-appengine-name.appspot.com/ was a numerical IP address I could simply route my domain i.e. 'mydomain.com' to the numerical IP address in the A name record. However, as from what I understand app engine has dynamic IP addresses for APP engine and so this is not possible.
What are my options here to route 'mydomain.com' to Google's App Engine domain: 'https://myappenginename.appspot.com/
' then?
In addition of John comment, if you choose the root domain of your service (in the example, my own domain gblaquiere.dev, a list of IPs (and 1 CNAME) is provided and you have to update your registrar with them
If you absolutely want only one IP to register, you can create an HTTPS Load balancer in front of App Engine and create a serverless NEG backend
Although #guillaume posted correctly above I just wanted to reiterate the steps explicitly. Generally someone asking such a question is a newbie to GCloud and it helps to have explicit steps.
At the App engine dashboard click on settings.
From the settings, click on ADD Custom Domain
To add a domain you needed to verify your domain with Google already, either through adding a TXT record or another method offered by Google (if you haven't registered your domain with Google). This verification can happen almost immediately with Registrars like namecheap.com or name.com (as per my experience)
Then go back to this custom domains area in the Google App Engine console and you will be provided with a list of verified domain you can select to route to your App Engine.
Once you have done this Google will provide you with a series of A, AAAA and a CNAMe record which you will need to update at your Registrar, generally in the advanced DNS settings.
This should definitely be sufficient. I think my struggle resulted due to a problem with my deployed app which I misdiagnosed as a problem with the DNS routing. Thanks for the previous responses which assisted me.
I have this problem when forwarding www CNAME to a Google App Engine application. It's not working maybe I am missing something.
Is it possible to forward CNAME to Google App Engine without adding custom domain?
The documentation you linked actually contains the answer to your question: You have to add a custom domain to your app with a wildcard.
And here is the reason why you have to add every domain to your custom domain.
When you create a cname it will always point to ghs.googlehosted.com. My guess is that the servers behind that domain are one huge load balancer, but that's not really important here. What is important is, that before your HTTP request is made the DNS name is resolved to an IP address. The range of IP addresses is the same for all appengine apps, so the server doesn't know that this particular request is intended for your app. However with that IP address a TCP connection is opened to the server. Now you send a request like:
GET / HTTP/1.1
HOST: www.yourcustomdomain.com
The server looks at the HOST part and must decide which app this request should be forwarded to. But it cannot know that if you didn't add your domain to the custom domains of your project. There simply is no information about where to route that request. So the simple answer is:
Yes you must add all your custom domains to your project, but you could use wildcards
No it will not work without that step, because the Google infrastructure houses tons of apps and your app does not have a dedicated IP address by which it could be identified
I hear that now we can do wildcard subdomains on google app engine (I haven't tried it myself, but I believe that's been a new feature added), but can we have a domain point to it?
So
new.example.com (works?)
newexample.com -> new.example.com (does this work? where newexample.com is acting as new.example.com)
The way I envision newexample.com, this would work as
newexample.com/blog in the url, but app engine would support it as new.example.com/blog
I guess I am trying to emphasize that I am NOT looking for domain fowarding where newexample.com just forwards users to new.example.com
Thanks!
UPDATE: To clarify, I wasn't meaning naked domain, but a url like this
www.newexample.com/blog can work as new.example.com/blog or perhaps even more clearly, new.example.appspot.com/blog
Yes you just have to use an asterix *.example.com when setting up your custom domain in google apps.
To serve your app on all subdomains within a given higher-level subdomain, you can use wildcard subdomain mapping: enter an asterisk in place of the lowest-level name. For example, entering * will cause your app to be served on all subdomains within your registered domain.
See Custom domains
*.yourappid.appspot.com domains work by default.
You can add your app to as many different Google Apps accounts (so can use multiple domains), but you can not use domain alias' within Google Apps, as only the primary domain from a google apps account is used.
Applications that use Google App Engine are not available for users at non-primary domains.
See Limitations for multiple domains
If the question is:
Can the "naked" domain such as newexample.com (i.e. without anything such as www. before it) be served by Google App Engine?
Then the answer is no - see the FAQ
Wildcard subdomains let you have any subdomain the a user enters (e.g. myphotos.example.com, yourphotos.example.com, etc...) be served by Google App Engine without having to set each one up individually. Although it does require a DNS provider that supports wildcards.
I setup a custom domain on GAE using the tutorial at aral balkan to access http;//app.apspot.com at http://app.com. (I can access the app at www.app.com)
The tutorial is pretty old(Sep 2008) and it mentions
Add four Hostnames for the naked
domain (i.e., yourdomain.com without
the www) and have them point to IP
addresses 216.239.32.21,
216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21, and 216.239.38.21.
I added the required A names to my domain dns, but accessing app.com leads me to a Google 404 page
I have used naked to www redirection on blogger using a similar method(A names provided by Google Blogger Help) and it has worked for me(it still works). However apart from the article at aralbalkan.com, I have not come across an official source which says that naked to www domain redirection using these IPs works for domains on Google Apps(which GAE uses to manage custom domains).
My Question:
Does anybody use a similar method(A names pointing to Google IPs) to resolve www domains from naked domains for custom domains on GAE? If yes, are the IPs different or am I doing it wrong?
The alternate method that I can think of using is, getting a third party host and pointing the A name of app.com to the IP address of that third party host, followed by placing a 301 redirect script to www.app.com on that host.But that will require me to manage another hosting just for naked to www redirection.
If anyone knows of any easier methods to achieve naked to www redirection on custom domains for GAE, please help.
Update:
Thank you for the answers. If it can be of any help, I am using geoscaling.com for DNS. I have an everydns account too. The domain is on namecheap and namecheap offers a freedns option too.
Update 2
Switched back my dns to namecheap. I guess geoscaling.com does not offer a 301 url redirect(correct me if I am wrong), although it's still a great service. Namecheap offers a 301 URL redirect. Should start working in some time.
While it's true Google doesn't officially support naked domains, it is possible to make this work using your registrar's DNS and Domain Forwarding tools.
For example, http://conversionsupport.com is hosted on Google App Engine, and GoDaddy is where the DNS is managed. The naked domain redirects to the http://www.conversionsupport.com subdomain using a domain forwarding rule.
Requests for the naked domain result in a 301 redirect to the www subdomain. Some SEO resources claim that using one subdomain is better for ensuring search engines don't see your site's content as being duplicative. This 301 redirect should help ensure that both naked domain and www subdomain are treated the same.
Here is a resource for Setting up URL Forwarding in GoDaddy. Note that while this is intended for Google Sites, I have confirmed that it does work on Google App Engine apps.
UPDATE:
To clarify, the naked domain itself will redirect to the www subdomain. This means that if your users type http://example.com then they'll be redirected to http://www.example.com as is the case with my original example above.
From what I understand, most Google Apps accounts are partnered with GoDaddy. Here are the Instructions from GoDaddy Support on Domain Forwarding Using a 301 Redirect..
Naked domains are not supported on App Engine. You need to use www-redirects, as you suggest.
Naked domain (e.g. yourdomain.com) support for App Engine can be setup in three steps:
Setup a naked domain redirect to a subdomain of your choice (e.g. redirect mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com). See the App Engine FAQ, which instructs you to configure the redirect via the Google Apps control panel for your domain.
Configure App Engine to serve traffic for your custom subdomain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com) via the Google Apps control panel.
(Optionally), setup SSL for your custom domain. This step is required if you which to serve https:// traffic, but not required if you only plan on hosting http:// content.
As nick says, naked domains are not supported by app engine.
On your point of easier methods to achieve naked to www redirection on custom domains... Some DNS hosts, (for example, dyndns.com) integrate that ability into their DNS control panel. You may check with your DNS provider to see if that is the case.
With all the changes over time, I wanted to post that GAE (at least at the time of this writing) DOES support naked domains. I have this working for wdydfun.com. Follow the directions as mentioned above by Fred Sauer and it will eventually work. I'd love to provide more detail on those steps, but things seem to change frequently. You'll have to click around a bit to find where to set stuff. With the DNS propagation time that can be a bit frustrating. I recommend running
dig ns <your url>
from the command line to help see what is going on. My "www" domain was resolving to ghs.google.com and my naked domain was resolving to dreamhost where the domain was registered. After filling out the extra "A" records from the google directions, the naked domain eventually started returning different information and it worked. If you are testing this out in a browser, it's worth mentioning that at the time of this writing webkit browsers seem to be pickier than mozilla. My DNS settings:
A 216.239.32.21
A 216.239.34.21
A 216.239.36.21
A 216.239.38.21
TXT google-site-verification=W0rC...fnQ
* CNAME ghs.google.com.
Yours will probably look similar. Unless the directions have changed again. The CNAME value changed since when I first set things up, so if what I'm writing here differs from the directions on Google, trust the directions on Google. HTH.
Naked domain mapping works from the Google Developers Console.
https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=777
We have added support for custom domains for App Engine from the
Google Developers Console, meaning you can now associate a custom
domain without first associating that domain with Google Apps.
To access the feature, visit https://console.developers.google.com/
and you will find the option to add a custom domain under App Engine >
Settings.
NOTE: Currently we do not support SSL on custom domains created
through this method (although we expect to rectify this in a future
release). In the meantime, we continue to support SSL (via VIP or SNI)
for custom domains that are created through Google Apps, and we
continue to provide free HTTPS for all *.appspot.com domains.
Alternatively, you could follow below steps which solves this problem, for sure,
Ping the website you are wanting to forward to, in order to get the
IP address if you don't know it.
"Run"; CMD; "ping yourwebsite.com"
Will display ping data and reply from IP address. Note this address.
Login to Godaddy.com to manage your account or other domain registry
site
Go to DNS Control Modify/Add "A Host"
Under "Host" enter: #
Under "Points To" Enter the IP Address you obtained earlier.
You are done! Site is forwarded without the www prefix when entered into
address bar.
More details and reference :
http://www.techproceed.com/2014/05/custom-domain-setup-on-blogger-with.html