How to dynamically create subdomains from the application

Hi there,

If you already have a wild card virtual host added in your Apache configuration, what you could also do is to add a wild card A record for *.yourdomain.com to point to your Droplet’s IP address.

That way you will not have to add DNS records individually for all domains, but they will automatically be available and pointing to your Droplet’s IP address.

Then on your application level, you could decide how to handle the logic.

Alternatively, you could indeed use the DigitalOcean API and create A records for each sub domain name separately:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/api-reference/#tag/Domain-Records

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,

Bobby

Yes, DigitalOcean provides an API that allows you to manage your DNS records, including creating and deleting subdomains dynamically. To use the API, you will need to generate a Personal Access Token (PAT) from your DigitalOcean account.

Once you have your PAT, you can use the DigitalOcean API client (doctl) to interact with the API from your application. doctl is a command-line tool that allows you to manage your DigitalOcean resources, including domains and DNS records.

To create a subdomain dynamically, you can use the doctl compute domain records create command. Here’s an example of how to create a subdomain named “test.example.com”:

doctl compute domain records create example.com --record-type A --record-name test --record-data <IP Address>

In this command, you specify the domain name (“example.com”), the record type (A record), the record name (“test”), and the record data (the IP address of your server).

To delete a subdomain dynamically, you can use the doctl compute domain records delete command. Here’s an example of how to delete the “test.example.com” subdomain:

doctl compute domain records delete example.com test A

In this command, you specify the domain name (“example.com”), the record name (“test”), and the record type (A record).

Using the DigitalOcean API and doctl, you can create and delete subdomains dynamically from your application. This allows you to create a scalable and flexible architecture that can adapt to the needs of your users.

Heya,

You can use a wildcard A record as mentioned by Bobby. Wildcard records are DNS records that direct requests for non-existent subdomains to a specified resource or IP address.

Link to our docs:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/glossary/wildcard-record/

Hope that this helps!