Custom Domains

When you are ready to share your site with the public you can add your own custom domain. Please make sure you have completed all of the requirements in before you launch before continuing.

If you are migrating an existing site to Pages and wish to minimize downtime, see minimizing downtime

It is possible to add up to 2 custom domains for your site, each one requires the completion of the following 3 steps:

1. Configure your DNS
   • Determine your domain type
   • Adding an apex domain
     • Your DNS provider supports ALIAS records
     • Your DNS provider does not support ALIAS records
   • Adding a subdomain
     • Minimizing downtime
   • CAA records
2. Notify Pages
3. Update your Site Settings

Configure your DNS

For each domain you add to Pages, there are 2 DNS records that you (or your DNS administrators) must create before Pages can serve your site at the chosen domain.

The details differ depending on the type of domain you would like to add.

• Determine your domain type
• Adding an apex domain
• Adding a subdomain

Determine your domain type

An “apex” or “2nd level” domain is the “root” of your domain and will contain only one “.”. A subdomain is any other domain and will contain more than one “.”.

Examples

Adding an apex domain

Because Pages does not currently provide static IP addresses, in order for Pages to serve a site at an apex domain your DNS provider must support ALIAS records. If they do not, you may require additional help for Pages to be able to serve your site at that domain.

• Your DNS provider supports ALIAS records
• Your DNS provider does not support ALIAS records

Your DNS provider supports ALIAS records

Then you only need to configure the following DNS records, replacing example.gov with your actual domain:

Your DNS provider does not support ALIAS records

Pages does not currently provide static IP addresses for which an A record can be used to direct traffic to your site. In this case you will have to utilize an external server that:

• is available at a static IP
• can redirect traffic from your apex domain to a subdomain (Ex. example.gov -> www.example.gov)
• includes an SSL certificate for the apex domain that you or your service provider acquires

If your agency or DNS provider has an available service, you (or they) can follow the following steps:

1. Obtain and install an SSL certificate for your apex domain on the “redirect” server
2. Configure the “redirect” server to redirect traffic from your apex domain to a subdomain (example.gov -> www.example.gov)

3. Configure the following DNS record, replacing example.gov with your actual domain and 1.1.1.1 with the actual IP address of your “redirect” server:

   type	name	value
   A	example.gov.	1.1.1.1

4. Follow the instructions in adding a subdomain for the subdomain to which you are redirecting.

Adding a subdomain

Configure the following DNS records, replacing sub.example.gov with your actual domain:

Minimizing downtime

It may take 5-10 minutes to provision an SSL certificate, so there will be a non-trivial amount of time between when the DNS records are created and when your site is live. To reduce the downtime, you can create the DNS records in two separate steps:

1. Create the CNAME record for the _acme-challenge subdomain as described above and notify Pages support
2. Pages support will notify you once SSL certificate has been issued
3. Create the CNAME record for your subdomain as described above

CAA records

If you aren’t already using CAA records, you don’t need to add one to work with Pages. You can check your existing records in DNS.

$ dig CAA example.gov
example.gov.           299     IN      CAA     0 issue "certificate-issuer.example.com"

If you are using CAA records, you must have a record for letsencrypt.org. This authorizes Pages to issue a TLS certificate for your domain. The CAA record should have no flags (0) and the issue tag. CAA records are “recursive” so they apply to all subdomains, unless overridden. Pages recommends adding a single CAA record for each of your Pages sites.

site-a.example.gov.           299     IN      CAA     0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
site-b.example.gov.           299     IN      CAA     0 issue "letsencrypt.org"

Notify Pages

Once your DNS changes are complete, notify Pages support via:

• email: pages-support@cloud.gov
• Slack: #cg-pages

Someone from the Pages support team will assist you and make the updates to the Pages platform.

Update your site settings

Once the Pages team has notified you that the platform changes are complete, update your Site Settings to reflect the new custom domain.

1. In the Pages web application, navigate to the Site Settings page for your site by clicking on the Site Settings link on the lefthand navigation:

2. Under “Live Site” enter the branch name you want to associate to the custom domain and full url of the domain you just configured. When you are done, (scroll down if necessary and) click “save basic settings”

   

3. Pages will rebuild your site and then it will be available at the custom domain. If you notice that your site does not look correct and/or any site assets (css, js, images) appear to be missing, make sure that the urls to those assets are correct, we provide the environment variable BASEURL for this purpose. If using Jekyll, please make sure you use site.baseurl when constructing asset urls manually or use the asset helper tag if using the jekyll-assets gem.