Question

Wildcard domain to catch all subdomains with Nginx

I found some topics related to my question but they are not clear enough for me.

I have a large list of subdomains and the list continues to grow.

I recently started using Digital Ocean and I need to recreate the list of subdomains but the process of creating them one by one using the DNS Server control panel is very time consuming and besides that, whenever I need to create a new subdomain I will have to do it manually.

I’m trying to create a wildcard domain so that all subdomains are captured by the DNS server and then each one is redirected to the specific service.

The service that will be used is Odoo and it will work together with Nginx.

What I’ve done so far:

In the DNS control panel at Digital Ocean, I created the following DNS records (including a * - wildcard domain):

A     *.example.com    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  3600
CNAME www.example.com  example.com      43200
A     example.com      xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  3600
NS    example.com      ns1.digitalocean.com 1800
NS    example.com      ns2.digitalocean.com 1800
NS    example.com      ns3.digitalocean.com 1800

For the records “example.com” and “www.example.com” everything seems to be working because when I ping I see that the traffic is redirected to the Digital Ocean droplet.

In Nginx I created a server block and included as servers:

server {
 ...

 server_name example.com www.example.com *.example.com .example.com test.example.com;

 ...
}

With this configuration, I can easily access the Odoo server using the addresses: example.com and www.example.com but when I try to access the address “test.example.com” I cannot access the server.

Surely it will be necessary to perform some more step that passed me and I didn’t find in my searches?

Can anyone help me please?

Thank you in advance


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I faced same problem. Did you find solution?

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
July 17, 2022

Hi there,

The configuration actually looks all correct. Did you way 24/48 hours for the DNS caching to clear over the Globe? To quickly check if any of your subdomains are actually pointing to the correct IP, you can using the ping command:

ping your_subdomain.example.com

If the IP address matches the IP address of your server, can you confirm what is the exact error that you get when you visit the subdomain via your browser.

Usually as long as you have the *.example.com A record and the *.example.com server_name it should all work as expected.

Best,

Bobby