DNS CNAME and Cloudron Redirect for WWW

[MCQtv 0]

I noticed that Google's link to my site was returning "You have found a Cloudron out in the wild" because it was using "www."

I tried to fix this by adding a redirect for www in Cloudron and then by deleting my www CNAME record in DNS.

Unfortunately this didnt work and now my entire site is returning "You have found a Cloudron out in the wild" for both www and non-www.

I added the CNAME back into the DNS but now I can't undo the Cloudron redirect because it says a CNAME record for with that host already exists: "Error : External Error - message: A CNAME record with that host already exists. statusCode: 400 code:81054"

Any ideas on how to get my site back up?

[nebulon]

Apparently you are using an automated DNS backend with Cloudron. DNS is a bit tricky with caching, so if you remove the CNAME and set a redirect or alias (depending on how you want it to be setup) within Cloudron should create the entries at the nameservers if that task does not error.
Once done check your nameserver dashboard for those records. If that looks valid, it may take quite a long time to fully propagate. Especially if you have maybe accessed that domain in-between and your system thus has hit NXDOMAIN error, then it maybe failing for you for up to an hour or so!

You can also send us a mail to support@cloudron.io with your domain name then I can run a few checks from here.

[girish]

This doesn't directly answer your question but might help debugging. You see the "You have found a Cloudron out in the wild" page when you point an arbitrary subdomain to the Cloudron server IP. It is essentially a "I have no clue what this domain page is" page.

With the above understanding, the first step is to make sure that Cloudron knows about this subdomain. For example, if you just put a DNS CNAME record to Cloudron server, this is not enough. Cloudron needs to know about this new subdomain you added - this is required so that it can setup certs and also setup nginx to serve the right app (if you have 10 apps on your server, what should Cloudron serve up for this subdomain?).

The way to let Cloudron know is to use redirects - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#redirections and I suspect this is what you are missing. Just add the "www" in the redirect section of the app in Cloudron dashboard. Some specific apps also allow aliases - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#aliases

[eddowding]

@girish I'm facing this exact same issue today so this is timely.

I have a redirect set up for www redirect, and set www as a cname on cloudflare, but still getting "This site can’t be reached"

URL: https://www.roundbear.org/

[girish]

@eddowding There doesn't seem to be a DNS entry at all. Can you check if www entry is there in cloudflare?

$ host www.roundbear.org
Host www.roundbear.org not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

[eddowding]

@girish said in DNS CNAME and Cloudron Redirect for WWW:

roundbear.org

Thanks - that'll teach me to test things simultaneously! Fixed.

Solution:

1. set cname on cloudflare to www / baredomain.com
2. set redirection on the app to add www

[ugacomp]

I had the same issue and I was able to follow the steps given about setting up a redirection in Cloudron. In fact, I decided to write a full article about it to help others understand how to fix this issue step by step.
You will have to make sure you put the right DNS entries and then set up the redirection. Read this guide here and it will help you to fix this issue.