Styjun

I have just pushed a Spring Boot / VueJS application to Pivotal Cloud Foundry and was wondering how I change the URL for the website?

When I pushed the application they gave me a URL of http://crdeckhelper.cfapps.io/

I went to godaddy and bought a domain of crwardecks.com

How do I make my application run on crwardecks.com?

I currently have godaddy re-routing the person to the URL that cloud foundry generated for me, but this is not the behavior that I want.

I have read the documentation on Pivotal but for some reason it confuses me. I have also searched for this on the web but wasn't able to find a good resource.

There's a couple things you need to do.

1. 
   

   Add your domain to Cloud Foundry. Run cf create-domain.

   
   
   

   https://docs.run.pivotal.io/devguide/deploy-apps/routes-domains.html#private-domains

   
   


2. 
   

   Map a route under this domain to your app. Run cf map-route <app> <domain> ....

   
   
   

   https://docs.run.pivotal.io/devguide/deploy-apps/routes-domains.html#map-route

   
   

At this point, you'll have the domain and route set up in CF, but nothing is sending traffic to CF.

To send traffic to your CF, you need to make an adjustment in your DNS records. Again, there's a couple of options.

1. You can route traffic for just one subdomain to the app, by creating a CNAME record that points from your custom domain to the domain assigned by CF. Ex: CNAME: www.example.com -> crdeckhelper.cfapps.io.




2. You can route traffic for all subdomains with a wildcard. Again we use a CNAME record but this time we use a wildcard. Ex: CNAME: *.example.com -> *.cfapps.io (or you could use some subdomain, like *.sub.cfapps.io).

Both are described more here. Also, cfapps.io is part of Pivotal Web Services. If you use a different provider then your shared domain will be different.

At this point, you should have traffic routing to CF & CF should be routing traffic to your specific app. Your done & you can stop reading, unless you are trying to map a root domain to your app.

There's an edge case around root domains (i.e. example.com, not www.example.com), because DNS CNAME records don't work for a root domain. Some DNS providers support ALIAS or ANAME records, which work like a CNAME record for root domains. If your provider does, you can give it a try (see your DNS provider's doc for instructions on how to use). If not, see if your provider supports URL forwarding. Many DNS providers will automatically redirect HTTP traffic on the root domain to a sub domain you specify, like example.com -> HTTP 302 -> www.example.com.

For more on root domain setup, see Configuring DNS for Your Registered Root Domain at the following link.

https://docs.run.pivotal.io/devguide/deploy-apps/routes-domains.html#domains-dns

As a last resort, you could use an A record, but you need to be very careful because your CF providers may not have static public IPs, rather their IPs can change. If you use an A record and your provider's IP changes, traffic will stop flowing to your app & you'll need to update your A record to point to their new IPs (you can get your provider's IPs by running dig <app-dns> or nslookup <app-dns>. If you go this route, make sure you have monitoring to quickly catch when IPs change.

Hope that helps!