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.

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.

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 I used them for the same exact purpose: [image] (Superseded) Redirect additional domain(s) to your Discourse instance Self-Hosting warning 2024-04-09 @pfaffman edited this to say that this is no longer necessary, as the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 config in the standard install redirects everything to https://HOSTNAME. You can test this by entering your IP address and see that it gets redirected. If you want multiple domains pointed to your server, you probably want them to have valid https certificates. To do that, follow instructions at Set up Let’s Encrypt with multiple domains / redirects. So you want to redirect domain(s) to yo… [image] Set up Let’s Encrypt with multiple domains / redirects Sysadmins NOTE: @pfaffman says: This page needs to be cleaned up. There is now a new ENV setting that will let you add more hostnames. In your app.yml under your DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME line (it can go many places but that one makes sense), add DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME_ALIASES: domain.com,other.domain.com and early reports suggest that you’ll get valid certs for those domains and that accessing https://domain.com will properly redirect you to your DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME without a certificate error. If you do that an…

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

merefield (Robert) May 8, 2020, 6:04am 5

You want these guides. I used them for the same exact purpose:

Topic		Replies	Views
Non www to www without certificate error Self-hosting	13	2156	January 17, 2022
Www.example.com OK, but example.com NOT Self-hosting	3	1207	September 4, 2019
Correct DNS records to set when Discourse is hosted on WWW subdomain? Self-hosting	2	1267	May 9, 2020
LetsEncrypt working without www, not with www Product Support	11	2140	January 19, 2020
About force www to non www Product Support	29	3096	January 6, 2019

Making 'www' work with Discourse

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