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Primary Domains

Primary Domains are the domains that users will be using to interact with your project on Servd.

For domains that are only redirecting to your Primary Domains, see Redirect Domains.

Add a Primary Domain #

  1. Visit your project's Domains page in the Servd dashboard.

  2. If you have any Primary Domain slots available, use the "Add a Primary Domain" form to add your desired domain.

    You do not need to include www. or any protocol.

  3. Click Add

    Your Primary Domain is now registered and ready to be Activated.

Activating Your Primary Domain #

  1. Click the "Ownership Pending" button. A popup will open containing one or more DNS records that need to be added to your Domain's DNS records in order to confirm that you own the domain.

    Add the supplied DNS records as per your DNS host's guidelines.

  2. Click the "SSL Pending" button. A popup will open containing one or more DNS records that need to be added to your Domain's DNS records in order to delegate the creation of SSL certificates for the domain to us.

    Add the supplied DNS records as per your DNS host's guidelines.

    If you do not wish to delegate the entire Domain's ACME SSL generation responsibility to us, get in touch and we'll provide an alternative method.

  3. Click the Refresh button next to your Domain to re-check the current activation status. This may take a few minutes.

  4. Once both Ownership and SSL are green, you are ready to send traffic towards Servd.

    Click the "DNS" button to open a modal containing the DNS information you'll need to add to your domain.

    If you have added any subdomain routing rules, suggestions for DNS records to send those to Servd will also be displayed.

  5. Once your Domain's DNS records have propagated, traffic will begin being sent to our platform.

Primary Domains are Wildcards #

When you add a Primary Domain to Servd, we assign the supplied domain as well as one level of wildcard subdomains to your project.

E.G. If your primary domain is example.com the following URLs will be valid for your project:

https://example.com

https://www.example.com

https://store.example.com

However these URLs will not:

https://notmydomain.com

https://multiple.subdomains.ex...

Disabling Wildcard Support #

There are some situations that might require you to disable wildcard support for a particular Primary Domain. Those include:

  • You would like to use a custom SSL certificate which does not support wildcard subdomains
  • You do not want to give us authority to handle certificates for all subdomains because one or more are hosted elsewhere and are managed via Let's Encrypt (or another ACME protocol provider)

In these circumstances you can disable wildcard support on a Primary Domain using the Advanced Options when it is initially created.

If wildcard support on a domain is disabled you will need to register the apex domain and its subdomains independently within Servd as either Primary Domains or Redirect Domains. This includes setting up a redirect between www. and the apex domain.

Hint: If you would like to check if your domain is currently using an ACME SSL certificate that might collide with Servd's Wildcard setup, you can check for any DNS TXT or CNAME records with the name _acme-challenge. E.G if your Primary Domain is *.servd.host, check for any TXT or CNAME records named _acme-challenge.servd.host. The following tool can help you find these records easily:

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#CNAME/_acme-challenge.servd.host

Note that this check is not 100% foolproof, and if records do exist they could be old ones that are no longer being used.

Routing Rules #

By default, all matching URLs will be routed to your Production environment. However you might want some of them to be directed to a different environment, or redirect elsewhere.

You can use Routing Rules to achieve this.

  1. Beneath your Primary Domain, click the "Show X Routing Rules" button

  2. Here you can change the default environment that the domain and its subdomains will be routed to.

    You can also click the "Add Route" button to add a new rule.

  3. Add the subdomain (or '@' for the supplied naked domain) and define an Environment or Redirect that you'd like that subdomain to use.

  4. Click "Save Routes" and then run a Sync to deploy your changes.

Redirect www and non-www #

When you add a Primary Domain which Servd believes to be an apex domain, we will automatically add a non-www to www redirect as a Routing Rule. If you'd like to change this to a www to non-www redirect, you can simply update the existing rule by setting the subdomain to 'www' and changing the redirect destination to your non-www domain.

Primary Domains Plan Addon #

The number of Primary Domains allowed for your project is determined by the Plan that the project is subscribed to.

If you have run out of Primary Domain slots but would like to add another, you can add a Primary Domain Addon to your project on the Plan page in the Servd Dashboard.