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Question

How to create a CNAME Record for the root domain?

Posted October 11, 2019 27.7k views
DNS

Hello.

My question is how to create a CNAME Record for the root domain “example.com”.

I’ve already looked at this tutorial here: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/dns/how-to/manage-records/

They wrote that I should use the “@” sign. Unfortunately when I try the “@” sign in the Hostname field I get the error: “Invalid Hostname”.

I wanna create the following alias:
example.com is an alias of foo.whatever.com

Thanks for the help !

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timoDjatomika
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timoDjatomika

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5 answers
jjaques October 12, 2019

Hey,

The reason you can’t enter it in the interface is because the DNS standard doesn’t allow CNAME for the root record. Root record always has to be A.

See more:

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-cant-a-domain-s-root-be-a-cname-8cbab38e5f5c/

To consolidate your records people usually go the other way.... foo.example.com is an alias of example.com

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  • SandyBlueClam April 30, 2021

    Then how do we point the domain name without “www” to a host without a static ip? for example AWS elastic load balancers have hostnames like xxx.elb.amazonaws.com. but their ids are not guaranteed to stay same.
    Any solution for this scenario?

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    • jjaques May 1, 2021

      Hi, raw DNS definitely doesn’t allow this. So the solution is basically some service which will update the A record automatically. You could call some digital ocean API yourself to update it from the server on some regular basis. Or you could use some DNS service which does this on your behalf, someone mentions below Namecheap does it, if you use Amazon route 53 they have “alias” record. Cheers, good luck

      Reply Report
sibipaul July 12, 2020

I’ve this Option in Namecheap…

But in Digital Ocean, they won’t allow us to Create CNAME for Root Domain.

if Your Domain is in Namecheap or any Domain Panel…

And Hosting is in Digital Ocean…

Then, I would suggest you to…

Remove Your Digital Ocean NS1, NS2, NS3 DNS Values ( Name Servers ) from Domain Panel…

Then, Create A Records to Your Digital Ocean Server IP

Also, Create CNAME from your Domain Panel…

Majority of the People, Including me…

Buying Domain from Namecheap, and from there Creates Name Server for Digital ocean to point Domain to the DO Server.

And Then, We Create All Values in Digital Ocean Panel…

That’s Good in some cases, but when we face issues like this… the old school method is Good…

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manzwebdesigns October 11, 2019

Hi @timoDjatomika,

Did you try putting example.com in instead of the @ sign?

I hope this helps!
Bud Manz

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  • timoDjatomika October 11, 2019

    Hey. Thanks for the answer.

    Unfortunately that does not work.

    Then it will get example.com.example.com is an alias of foo.whatever.com

    :(

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    • manzwebdesigns October 11, 2019

      Okay, I think I understand now… so you are wanting example.com to point to another domain. In that case, the @ should reference the domain you want example.com to go to. For example, if you want foo.com to be pointed at bar.org, then bar.org would be the @. I am not entirely sure this is possible.

      Bud

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alexdo October 11, 2019

Hey, @timoDjatomika

Could you please let me know if you want to set example.com as alias of foo.example.com or the other way around?

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  • timoDjatomika October 11, 2019

    I simply wanna use cloudfront for my domain example.com. Therefore I have to create a CNAME Record that refers to another domain. Lets say foo.whatever.com.

    I just cloud create the record for www.example.com. But this is not what I want.
    The main content should be provided by example.com

    Also the CNAME’s for www.example.com and example.com are not the same.

    This should be somehow possible because of the tutorial described in my initial question. I just can’t use the “@” symbol (tried in different web browsers).

    Furthermore I successfully created a CNAME for example.com with cloudflare. So technically this shouldn’t be a problem.

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timoDjatomika October 12, 2019

According to this blog post: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-cant-a-domain-s-root-be-a-cname-8cbab38e5f5c/

I shouldn’t use the CNAME for the root domain. Some DNS Providers implemented a workaround (e.g. Cloudflare) so thats the reason why it worked for my other domain (using Cloudfront to host a website and Cloudflare as my DNS Provider).

I think digitalocean decided not to implement such a workaround because of reasons that I don’t know (maybe they wanna stick to a standard???)

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