A Question About Domains, Subdomains, Email, and DNS

[jordanurbs]

I'm having trouble understanding how to keep my current services separated and still use Cloudron.

Let's say I use ProtonMail for my domain's email. I host a landing page on the apex domain with Netlify (or DigitalOcean). And nowI want to host apps on subdomains with Cloudron on a completely different instance.

I'm starting to think this is not possible... or at least most of it? Could someone please point me int he right direction?

[girish]

@jordanurbs Sure, that's not a problem at all.

When you add a domain say domain.com, all you are doing is giving Cloudron information on how to add/remove subdomains. At the point when you add a domain, it does the following:

• Adjust the existing SPF record to allow the Cloudron server to send email on behalf of the domain. So, it will add a:my.dashboarddomain.com into the existing SPF record.
• Add a DKIM key to the DNS (for email signing). This key is unique as well and won't affect your existing DNS records.

Then, when you install an app into say app.domain.com, it will add an entry in the DNS to make app subdomain point to your Cloudron server. The rest of the DNS is in tact. So, your app on apex domain or your email services on proton mail are completely unaffected.

Finally, only when you enable incoming mail for the domain in the Email view, Cloudron will add the MX and DMARC records.

If you by mistake try to install an app into a subdomain that is already in use in your DNS (say you install into apex domain), then Cloudron will give a warning saying that something is already there and give you a choice whether to overwrite it or not.

You can safely add the same domain in multiple Cloudron installations. As you can see above, the DNS records don't affect each other.

Does that help?

[jordanurbs]

@girish thanks for your detailed response. I resolved the mail issue, it looks like I was confusing outbound versus inbound

For subdomains, it looks like my issue is with the DNS provider. Some apparently don't allow the * symbol for a wildcard domain (this one in particular is Wix), in particular when the apex domain points to a different IP.

[girish]

@jordanurbs said in A Question About Domains, Subdomains, Email, and DNS:

. Some apparently don't allow the * symbol for a wildcard domain

You can also use the manual dns provider. With that, you just have to add the DNS entry manually before you install an app. The UI will remind you to add a DNS entry.