The heavy lifting is automated using CloudFormation, so this entire process shouldn’t require more than a few minutes of active work.

Before starting, you will need the following:

  • The domain you want to redirect away from (e.g.: example.com, myapp.io, etc.).

  • The subdomain you want to redirect to (e.g.: app, www, etc.).

  • Access to the DNS configuration for the domain. Your DNS provider must support ALIAS records (also known as CNAME flattening). We support the following DNS providers in this tutorial: Amazon Route 53, CloudFlare, DNSimple. If your DNS provider does not support ALIAS records, then we encourage you to migrate your NS records to one that does.

  • Access to one of the mailboxes used by AWS Certificate Manager to validate ownership of your domain. If you registered the domain yourself, that should be the case, but otherwise, review the relevant AWS Certificate Manager documentation first.

  • An AWS account.

After completing this tutorial, you will have an inexpensive highly-available redirect from your domain apex to your subdomain, which will require absolutely no maintenance going forward.

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Create the CloudFormation Stack

Navigate to the CloudFormation Console, and click “Create Stack”.

Note that you must create this stack in the us-east-1 region, but your redirect will be served globally with minimal latency via AWS CloudFront.

Choose “Specify an Amazon S3 template URL”, and use the following template URL:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.aptible.com/assets/cloudformation-redirect.yaml

Click “Next”, then:

  • For the Stack name, choose any name you’ll recognize in the future, e.g.: redirect-example-com.

  • For the Domain parameter, input the domain you want to redirect away from.

  • For the Subdomain parameter, use the subdomain. Don’t include the domain itself there! For example, you want to redirect to app.example.com, then just input app.

  • For the ViewerBucketName parameter, input any name you’ll recognize in the future. You cannot use dots here. A name like redirect-example-com will work here too.

Then, hit “Next”, and click through the following screen as well.

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Validate Domain Ownership

In order to set up the apex redirect to require no maintenance, the CloudFormation template we provide uses AWS Certificate Manager to automatically provision and renew a (free) certificate to serve the redirect from your domain apex to your subdomain.

To make this work, you’ll need to validate with AWS that you own the domain you’re using. So, once the CloudFormation stack enters the state CREATE_IN_PROGRESS, navigate to your mailbox, and look for an email from AWS to validate your domain ownership.

Once you receive it, read the instructions and click through to validate.

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Wait for a little while!

Wait for the CloudFormation stack to enter the state CREATE_COMPLETE.

This process will take about one hour, so sit back while CloudFormation does the work and come back once it’s complete (but we’d suggest you stay around for the first 5 minutes or so in case an error shows up).

If, for some reason, the process fails, review the error in the stack’s Events tab. This may be caused by choosing a bucket name that is already in use. Once you’ve identified the error, delete the stack, and start over again.

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Configure your DNS provider

Once CloudFormation is done working, you need to tie it all together by routing requests from your domain apex to CloudFormation.

To do this, you’ll need to get the DistributionHostname provided by CloudFormation as an output for the stack. You can find it in CloudFormation under the Outputs tab for the stack after its state changes to CREATE_COMPLETE.

Once you have the hostname in hand, the instructions depend on your DNS provider.

If you’re setting up a redirect for a domain that’s already serving production traffic, now is a good time to check that the redirect works the way you expect.

To do so, use curl and verify that the following requests return a redirect to the right host (you should see a Location header in the response):

# $DOMAIN should be set to your domain apex.
# $DISTRIBUTION should be set to the DistributionHostname.

# This should redirect to your subdomain over HTTP.
curl -v -H 'Host: $DOMAIN' 'http://$DISTRIBUTION'

# This should redirect to your subdomain over HTTPS.
curl -v -H 'Host: $DOMAIN' 'https://$DISTRIBUTION'

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If you use Amazon Route 53

Navigate to the Hosted Zone for your domain, then create a new record using the following options:

  • Name: Leave this blank (this represents your domain apex).

  • Type: A.

  • Alias: Yes.

  • Alias Target: the DistributionHostname you got from CloudFormation.

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If you use Cloudflare

Navigate to the CloudFlare dashboard for your domain, and create a new record with the following options:

  • Type: CNAME.

  • Name: Your domain.

  • Domain Name: the DistributionHostname you got from CloudFormation.

Cloudflare will note that CNAME flattening will be used. That’s OK, and expected.

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If you use DNSimple

Navigate to the DNSimple dashboard for your domain, and create a new record with the following options:

  • Type: ALIAS

  • Name: Leave this blank (this represents your domain apex).

  • Alias For: the DistributionHostname you got from CloudFormation.

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