Full Stack for Front-End Engineers, v2 Domain Setup

[00:00:00]
>> Jem Young: So let's set up that domain, we bought it. But right now if you go there it points to like a holding page or a blank page or it doesn't resolve anything depending on who your hosting provider is. But what we want to do is we want to point the domain to the new server.

[00:00:14] And this is where it gets tricky. Kidding, it's not that tricky, but it's going to involve these records and if I said, modify your a record to do this, t wouldn't make any sense. But now it does because you're all up here now at DNS Records. So what we want to do is we want to add two A records to our domain.

[00:00:33] We want to use the @, which is the root domain. So for instance jemisthe.best is my root domain. Which is actually different from www.jemisthebest. Man that was a good domain name I'm glad, I like to say that all the time. What we wanna do it to make it easier, we can use GoDaddy or Google domains or name cheap to modify the A records.

[00:00:59] But what I'd rather do, and I think it's a little bit easier, we can use Digital Ocean and use their name servers, because honestly, their UI is just easier to use. So the first thing we want to do is we want to modify our name servers from Digital Ocean on whatever hosting provider we have.

[00:01:15] So I'm going to walk through that it's going to look a little different depending on who owns your domain. But generally the steps are always going to be the same. So I'll go back to, first I'll go with Digital Ocean. And let's see, I'm gonna go to manage and I believe it's networking.

[00:01:41]
>> Jem Young: Yes, so what I can do is I can enter the domain that eventually I wanna create records for. So I'm gonna say, jemisthe.best. And I'm gonna add that domain for now. And then it gives you the option up here to say Hey, I want to create a different record right now we're just going to use the a record.

[00:02:06] Someone say at and I regret now not naming my server something better. I believe it's this one. And it's nice because Digital Ocean keeps track of your droplets and your IP addresses so it'll automatically populate whichever one. Whichever IP address you wanna point it to based on the drop that you have.

[00:02:28] So we can create one record for that, and then I want another one for WWW, which is different from just the canonical root domain, and then I wanna direct to the same droplets. And then I'm going to create a new record.
>> Jem Young: So at this point, your DNS records location should look something like this.

[00:02:54] And the a record that says hey DNS record is hear that a record says, DNS record says here and then we have these name servers Again, name servers are they hold the address book, they hold the phone book. But right now, if you go to whatever domain you bought, it's not going to redirect to your website yet.

[00:03:13] That's because one, your server is not really up and running. It's running but it's not really accepting connections to the name servers wrong So what we need to do is change the name server to give control to the hosting provider to say, hey, actually I want to use Digital Ocean, same server, not yours.

[00:03:29] So I'm gonna copy this name. And using whatever your hosting provider is, I'm using name cheap. I'm gonna go to Domain. And this is under configuration. It's gonna look a little bit different depending on who your host is. But the principle will be the same. If you have questions you can just google GoDaddy or whatever, change the name server.

[00:03:53] Okay, so whatever your hosting provider is just find where to change the name server. For Namecheap it's under advanced DNS. And we'll go to Custom Nameservers. Actually, no. We wanna go to not Find Nameservers. We wanna go to Add Nameserver.
>> Jem Young: Actually, that isn't correct, too. I did this before and it always stress me out because the way it's named.

[00:04:18] It's on domain. All right, I forgot it's under domain and there's also name servers under Advanced DNS, but that's something we wanna go with. We wanna go with custom DNS. And I'm just gonna paste in the Digital Ocean name server. Remember, I grabbed that from here. It's usually ns one and ns two and ns three for almost all hosting providers.

[00:04:43] And going to paste on this. Going to move the dot i don't know when you copy use the copy command Digital Ocean does that. I don't think it matters but I like to remove it anyways. And I'm just going to give name server three. Dots. Then I'm gonna hit this check mark save.

[00:05:05]
>> Jem Young: What I'm doing, so what I we just did was we move the canonical record. The record of, if I go to jem is the best. I moved who owns that record to Digital Ocean now. So now. They're going to be once the route 30 means once control it might take 48 hours to take effect.

[00:05:24] It might take 30, 20, 30 minutes to update again because they're massive records and they're shifting ownership over the internet and there's servers now to coordinate and all these things like that. So give it some time it will probably take by the time we finished our server setup, it should be ready to go.

[00:05:36] But it won't be ready immediately, because these things take time to expire then renew and all that type of things. Any questions so far? Everybody with me? I know that was a little tedious, but we're doing that nitty gritty of how do you actually point a domain to a server.