I bought a custom domain

2018-05-12

I decided to buy a custom domain from Google Domains because why the hell not. mmodin.com only cost me $12 for a year and hopefully gives me some incentives to continue writing posts. Either way, prior to this I had very little experience with configuring DNS’ and I ultimately had to spend some time “researching” how to get things working. This is what I did.

  1. Add a file called CNAME in the root directory of my github repository with the entry mmodin.com.
  2. Configured an A record, CAA and CNAME with Google Domains.

The 2nd step took me a while to figure out as I wanted to ensure that the new domain automatically used (and redirected) all traffic to HTTPS. Luckily, Github has very recently partnered (read announcement here) with letsencrypt.org to support HTTPS natively with custom domains. This means that there’s no need to generate RSA keys or fiddling around.

googledomains

Note how the CAA entry reads 0 issue "letsencrypt.org". Once this was configured all you have to do is enforce it via the the GitHub settings, however, before this is possible GitHub/letsencrypt will need to generate the certificates which can take some time. You’ll see this in the meantime:

enforcehttps

As of writing I’ve been waiting for 36 hours since I enabled letsencrypt as CA via Google Domains.