Www.example.com OK, but example.com NOT

[John_Smith3 (John Smith)]

Aloha!

When I type www.mydomain.com into a browser it goes to my Discourse site, however, when I type mydomain.com (without www.) it does not.

I followed Discourse’s GoDaddy set up exactly, can anyone explain how to get the mydomain.com to work?

Mahalo.

[endukugga (Alfonso Muñoz Pomer Fuentes)]

This issue has nothing to do with Discourse and it’s about your domain DNS records. From your description it looks like you have an A record for the subdomain www pointing at the IP address where you’re hosting Discourse, which is different to the root domain (usually an A record with the name @). I’ve never used GoDaddy, so it’s better if you browse through their help section unless somebody else here can help you out.

[merefield (Robert)]

It’s likely more than that. You also need to deal with Let’s Encrypt and your proxy to make this work if you are using https (like you should!)

See:

Set up Let’s Encrypt with multiple domains / redirects

This is to address the problem where you get certificate errors with any redirects or CNAME DNS entries which point to your actual installed Discourse (sub)domain. If you do not have https configured already (you do if you have done a standard install recently) see Setting up Let’s Encrypt as your first step. There are two patterns that need to be replaced, one ending in --keylength, and another ending in --fullchainpath (in the actual file, your original domain is before each of these switche…

If I were you, keep it simple and use only one.

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

Configure the @ record for your domain as an A record to 45.55.96.103

This leverages our (free) service that redirects anything.tld to www.anything.tld.