Allowing users to use custom domains for Django app on Heroku

Question

I have a Django app hosting on Heroku. In the app, the users create pages at http://domain.com/username

I'd like to give users the option to use their own domain name for their page using a CNAME. Ideally I'd like to avoid an A-Record in case I change hosts in the future and my IP changes.

This is completely new territory for me and dont even know where to start, or what to look for. Does anyone have a suggestion on where to start? I've seen mention of Wildcard DNS, but not sure how that ties into my app.

Any suggestions would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Prelim Answer:

If you control the nameserver for the domain and have access to the RNDC Key, you can use the post-signup view/signal to squirt out a cname to your DNS server that will resove username.yoursite.com to yoursite.com. Make sure apache is set up to recieve a wildcard virtualhost to the correct app, and then use a custom middleware to read request.META['SERVER_NAME'].lsplit('.')[0] to see what the subdomain is. You can then use this information in your views to differentiate user subdomains.