Go Daddy DNS & Heroku

29 Jun

As easy as using Heroku is, setting up DNS seems to be one of the trickier parts. Heroku has some decent instructions, but the dirty secret is that their required config is actually in violation of the DNS RFC.  While I’m sure they’re trying to fix this, I’ve been running this for a few months and it does actually work, email and all.

Show don’t tell, so here’s a 2 minute screencast that walks through the process of setting it up.  For those who want the one piece of magic: when you want to setup your domain to point to heroku so that http://yourdomain.com actually works, the trick is in the “host” field of the CNAME, put yourdomain.com. <— NOTICE that there is a trailing period there.  Put your domain name, plus a period at the end of it, and you should be good.

Configure Go Daddy DNS & Heroku from Oren Teich on Vimeo.

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  • Thank you very much.
    Especially the tip on how to get root domain to work.
  • This doesn't appear to work anymore. I'm getting a "ERROR - Please enter a valid IP address for the Points To field."

    :(
  • jeniliaa
    Nice concept fine.I used the Godaddy reseller site for the Domain name registration the site named as tucktail.com.
  • nateclark
    Nice demo, but this only works for you because Heroku also happens to be using Google Apps for their email. If you wanted to use another email provider for the MX record, this setup will break your ability to receive mail. I've been struggling with this problem for a while with a Heroku app that I'm working on. I was using GoDaddy's free email forwarding to forward mail from my domain to my personal Gmail account ... but as soon as you set a CNAME pointing to Heroku, most mail servers won't be able to find your MX records, they'll only find Heroku's MX, which currently point to Google Apps.

    As you mentioned, this hack actually breaks the RFC. In your case, it works because you and Heroku both use Google apps for MX ... that's nice and probably won't change very often, but it's still a hack.

    It would be nice if Heroku offered a reliable IP address, so we could just create an A record like you would normally do. This would definitely be something I'd be willing to pay for.
  • Howdy,

    Going to "Advanced mode" allows you to select all records to delete them all at once.

    jpoz
  • foi
    Good job! молодец
  • nbhat
    That was very useful esp the dot trick. Thanks !
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