I have set up my Discourse community with Digital Ocean, but the domain name is “naked”, at just https://example.com. I would like to add the www., but not quite sure what I am doing when it comes to DNS settings! At the moment I have an ‘A’ record pointing to the IP and a ‘CNAME’ record with www. pointing to this. Is it as simple as changing the www. to an ‘A’ record and ditching the CNAME? Or perhaps I have them both as ‘A’ records? Or perhaps there is a simple setting in Discourse itself which selects how the domain will appear? It is funny, I have a normal wix site which appears to be the same configuration with a naked A record and www. CNAME which shows up as www. in the browser - so I am not sure what it is that makes it show like that. I promise I have tried to further educate myself on DNS, but am totally confused! Any help on how to add the www. is much appreciated! :slight_smile:

I think that’s how it works. :+1:

First off, create a DNS record like: TYPE: CNAME HOST: WWW POINTS TO: @ Then follow this guide: [image] Change the domain name or rename your Discourse Self-Hosting bookmark This guide explains how-to change the domain name of your Discourse site, and includes information about setting up DNS changes, editing configuration files, updating site settings, and correcting social logins and post content to reflect your new domain name. warning This guide is for self-hosted Discourse instances that were installed using our installation guide on GitHub. If you are hosted by Discourse, please see Configure your domain name for hosted Discourse for specific …

Thank you very much for this - I have successfully got it working at the www. by re-running the discourse-setup script as in your article, but now the naked domain no longer works! Is there any way I can make the naked domain work as well - or at least automatically fill in the www.? So I now have A record linking naked domain to IP address CNAME record linking www to naked domain Many thanks!

The easy way is forcewww.com. Harder is Setting up Let’s Encrypt with Multiple Domains.

Both of those methods provide a letsencrypt certificate for the second (sub)domain. Adding the extra info to your app.yml covers both domain addresses in the same certificate, and forcewww.com has some special magic that does it on the fly so you don’t have to worry about it:

O.K sounds as if I should just use forcewww. Can I just confirm (sorry I am very out of my depth) - they are asking me to set up the www as an A record to my server IP, and the naked domain as an A record to the IP address they give? So no CNAMES? What I have now: A record pointing naked domain to server IP CNAME record pointing www to naked domain Proposed change using ForceWWW A record pointing naked domain to forcewww IP A record pointing www to my server IP

Thanks! I have set it up - not working yet (typing in naked domain) but it may take a few hours to take effect so will wait and see!

Yay I think it works! Thank you very much for all your help!

Unfortunately - this has somehow broken the emailing system - the site is not sending any emails through mailgun. Might this be because of the forcewww - as the host is now through their server? Or do I need to update mailgun to say www? Lord give me strength.

You need to change the DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL to noreply@baredomain.com. I’d edit the yml and destroy and start the container.

Adding www. to Domain

Product Support Self-hosting

jamierobinson (Jamie Robinson) March 19, 2022, 4:19pm 5

Thank you for this - I have read through both options, but just wondered, why could I not just use a simple 301 redirect to redirect from naked domain to www.? Is this worth a try or am I breaking DNS laws?

Topic		Replies	Views
Making 'www' work with Discourse Product Support	30	3058	May 15, 2020
Www.example.com OK, but example.com NOT Self-hosting	3	1212	September 4, 2019
How to install Discourse in WWW Self-hosting	3	1242	December 2, 2020
Correct DNS records to set when Discourse is hosted on WWW subdomain? Self-hosting	2	1271	May 9, 2020
How can I enable www subdomain Self-hosting	9	1525	March 29, 2019

Adding www. to Domain

Related topics