Question

Customize TTL for a domain DNS SOA?

It seems that the DNS SOA TTL is fixed at 1800 seconds. This means that if I host the zone example.com at ns*.digitalocean.com, a negative result (NXDOMAIN) for mysubdomain.example.com will be cached for half an hour.

(This long-lived negative caching is a problem for my use case because the negative result gets cached by cert-manager before I can go in and add the correct A or CNAME record for my subdomain. If I create the DNS record first, it’s okay, but if I forget and create my Ingress first, then I’m stuck for half an hour!)

Would it be possible to set a custom TTL on the SOA record, via API? For example, I’d like to be able to do something simple like PATCH https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/example.com with data {"ttl": 30}. Thank you for your assistance.


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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January 20, 2022
Accepted Answer

Hi @compumike

Yes, the DigitalOcean API does allow you to change TTL on a DNS record, you can check there here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/api-reference/#operation/patch_update_domain_record

To update an existing record, send a PUT request to /v2/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME/records/$DOMAIN_RECORD_ID. Any attribute valid for the record type can be set to a new value for the record.

With curl it should look something like that:

curl -X PUT \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  -d '{"ttl":"200"}' \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/example.com/records/3352896"

Hope this helps.

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