Hi there, I would like to make sure the www subdomain redirects the users to the actual Discourse install. I feel like this needs to be the case to ensure I don’t lose visitors. Most people don’t leave out the ‘www’ when visiting websites.

Will this cause issues when the user visits using the www version? Discourse is set to not have the www included.

No because the user will be redirected. It won’t serve the same site under multiple domains.

You want these guides. I used them for the same exact purpose: [image] (Superseded) Redirect additional domain(s) to your Discourse instance Self-Hosting warning 2024-04-09 @pfaffman edited this to say that this is no longer necessary, as the current NGINX co…

Are you saying adding the A record for ‘www’ isn’t enough? I read through those articles.

My site would get a nasty message on the browser without registering a certificate for both “sub-domains”.

I’ve just set up Discourse on a Digital Ocean droplet. For step 2, editing discourse.conf, does that require nginx to be installed? I’m not certain but I don’t think my droplet has nginx installed and I’m at a loss with how to install it.

I think this guide explains that part: https://meta.discourse.org/t/running-other-websites-on-the-same-machine-as-discourse/17247/294

Yes adding an a record for www aimed at the same IP will be adequate to redirect the traffic. You don’t need to do anything outlined in those other guides, an A record pointed to the IP will suffice for a simple redirect. Try not to complicate your install unless absolutely necessary.

Will this be enough to avoid a NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID browser error though? If I install discourse on the www subdomain, accessing the site with https://example.com gives me that error. It only works if you use https://www.example.com .

Making 'www' work with Discourse

Product Support

007 May 8, 2020, 4:29am 2

You need to add an A record in your DNS settings at your registrar for www pointing to the server’s IP. The same one you are currently pointing the domain.com A record to.

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Making 'www' work with Discourse

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