Custom domains

Custom domains allow you to use your own domain names to access the HTTP vals you created. This feature enables a branded and professional experience for users visiting your vals.

Buy a domain

The custom domains feature works with domains that you already own, and connects them to your val, which serves all traffic to the domain. You’ll need to configure DNS settings with your domain registrar to make this work.

Some domain registrars that you can use to buy a domain:

Add your domain to Val Town

Once you have a domain, navigate to Val Town’s custom domain settings and add the domain that you want to redirect to one of your vals.

Then choose a val to handle requests to that domain.

Configure the DNS

Lastly, you’ll need to configure the DNS settings in your domain registrar so that requests are routed to your val. We provide a summary of the information below on the domain page for your convenience.

The DNS configuration will depend on the type of domain, apex domains (example.com) or subdomains (something.example.com). These settings will depend on the platform you use to manage your domains.

Subdomains

Create a CNAME record to domains.val.run.:

CNAME record	value
`something.example.com.`	`domains.val.run.`

Replace something.example.com. with your domain. In some domain platforms, you should only use the subdomain, which would be something in the example above.

Apex domains

Create the following two A records:

A record	value
`example.com.`	`75.2.96.173`
`example.com.`	`99.83.186.151`

Replace example.com. with your domain. In some domain platforms, you should replace example.com. with @.

Debugging

Unfortunately, custom domains can take minutes or hours to propogagte, which is quite fustrating, because you don’t know if you just need to wait or if your settings are incorrect.

Even worse, the domain settings can be cached in multiple places, including some outside of your control, including your local network. So if you check your custom domain too early, then you’ll continue to not see it working, even when it’s properly working on systems that don’t have it cached. (If we had a dollar every time a user sent us a message asking for help getting their custom domain working, and when we checked it was already working, we’d have almost ten dollars.)

In other words, use our DNS Debugger to see if your custom domain is correctly set up.