Changing from wildcard to provider-based dns configuration left apps and my.example.com unassigned after wildcard was deleted

[infogulch]

I started my configuration out with wildcard setup, but then decided to switch to provider-based dns after installing a couple apps. Then I deleted the wildcard DNS record and tried to use the apps...

These are two minor issues which I was able to solve, but which I didn't see explicitly noted anywhere.

1. Some apps stopped working after I removed the wildcard domain.
   This was solved by going to each app's Location settings page and clicking save, which I guess does the dns setup that is otherwise only done on app initialization.
2. my.example.com stopped working
   Creating the record manually was easy enough, and once propagated it worked fine.
   On second thought, I probably could have gone to https://ip and done... something else on the dashboard. (Maybe save on the domain page?)

I think it would be neat if Cloudron performed these steps automatically when switching from wildcard to provider-based dns.

[scooke]

@infogulch How would Cloudron know when a user switched? I'm not super familiar with the tech, but isn't DNS management on the user?

[nebulon]

Hm I guess we could add some button to re-setup all DNS records via the dashboard. This would mean after reconfiguring the domain provider, one can hit that button and then later remove the wildcard entries. I am just not sure what side-effects this could have. For example we don't overwrite existing DNS records, if they were not setup by Cloudron as such, to mitigate the risk of breaking a mixed setup.

[girish]

Maybe for a start, we can add a warning that DNS records are not switched automatically. We do similar in the backups view where we say we do not delete old backups.

But @infogulch you can open a feature request here for having a way to manually resync the DNS records. We already have a button like this for email DNS records, we can add another one for apps.

[infogulch]

Thanks @girish, I created a feature request here!

@scooke, Cloudron would know when the user switches DNS configurations when they choose a different provider on the "Domains & Certs" settings page for their domain.

@nebulon said:

we don't overwrite existing DNS records, if they were not setup by Cloudron as such, to mitigate the risk of breaking a mixed setup.

That makes a lot of sense. Curious, does Cloudron log when it encounters an existing DNS record that it should not overwrite?

[girish]

@infogulch said in Changing from wildcard to provider-based dns configuration left apps and my.example.com unassigned after wildcard was deleted:

That makes a lot of sense. Curious, does Cloudron log when it encounters an existing DNS record that it should not overwrite?

It will show the error in the UI. If you try to install an app into a subdomain that has a DNS entry, it will error and give you an option to "overwrite" the DNS record.