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

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…

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.