Add a custom domain

Every solution in Appfarm comes with a unique name and a unique appfarm.app URL. For example, your solution may be named ThirtyFifty Inc, having thirtyfifty.appfarm.app as URL to the production environment.

Appfarm also supports custom URLs for the production environment. For example, you may want to use portal.thirtyfifty.com instead.

For the above example of ThirtyFifty Inc, here are the prerequisites and steps to be followed.

Prerequisites

• You need access to the operator of the thirtyfifty.com domain. This is normally some department or employee of ThirtyFifty Inc (but this is sometimes outsourced as well)

• You need either a dedicated subdomain (such as portal.thirtyfifty.com) or the root domain (such as thirtyfifty.com) to be pointed towards the appfarm.app domain. You cannot point a URL such as thirtyfifty.com/portalto the appfarm.app domain, when thirtyfifty.com is already being used for the main website. In this case, you will need to create a subdomain portal.thirtyfifty.com.

• You may only have 1 custom domain, and that domain must point to the root appfarm domain. Example: You cannot point portal.thirtyfifty.com to a subdirectory such as thirtyfifty.appfarm.app/myapp. See explaination in Comments.

Steps

1. By the Customer (technical operator of thirtyfifty.com): Create a subdomain such as portal.thirtyfifty.com (the name "portal" may be something else also). CNAME records of portal.thirtyfifty.com must be mapped to thirtyfifty.appfarm.app.

2. By Appfarm: Let Appfarm know when step 1 is done, and we will complete the setup on our side.

Comments

• Note that both the appfarm.app domain and the new custom domain will work after a new custom domain has been configured.

• The reason why you cannon map portal.thirtyfifty.com directly to the App (i.e. subdirectory) thirtyfifty.appfarm.app/myapp, is that the CNAME mapping translates to an IP address (that targets the root thirtyfifty.appfarm.app).

• Example: You want custom domain mypage.thirtyfifty.com to point directly to the app "My Page" and another domain admin.thirtyfifty.com to point to the app "Admin". Due to the reason explained in the previous point, that is not possible. The solution is to have a single custom domain, for example app.thirtyfifty.com (pointing towards thirtyfifty.appfarm.app). That would result in the following directlinks to the apps: app.thirtyfifty.com/mypage and app.thirtyfifty.com/admin.

• If you distribute the URL portal.thirtyfifty.com to your users - the users will remain in this domain while using the App. Also, if your App makes use of App Variables.Hostname, the value of this variable will be the current hostname (portal.thirtyfifty.com). The new domain is the default domain for Services (which may also use Service Variables.Hostname for constructing URLs if used for sending emails).

In the case where your organization has CAA records (Certification Authority Authorization) for the top domain (e.g. thirtyfifty.com), Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt.org) must be specified as a supported Certificate Authority. You must add a CAA record that should look something like this: 0 issue “letsencrypt.org”. Without this, Appfarm cannot generate valid certificates for subdomains (e.g. portal.thirtyfifty.com), since Appfarm is using Let's Encrypt as CA.