How to use Google App Engine with my own naked domain (not subdomain)?

Question

[Update April 2016] This answer is now outdated, custom naked domain mapping is supported, see Lawrence Mok's answer.

I have figured it out!

First off: it is impossible to link something like mydomain.com with your appspot app. This is considered a naked domain, which is not supported by Google App Engine (anymore). Strictly speaking, the answer to my question has to be "impossible". Read on...

All you can do is add subdomains pointing to your app, e.g myappid.mydomain.com. The key to get your top level domain linked to your app is to realize that www is a subdomain like any other!

myappid.mydomain.com is treated exactly the same as www.mydomain.com!

Here are the steps:

1. Go to appengine.google.com, open your app
2. Administration > Versions > Add Domain... (your domain has to be linked to your Google Apps account, follow the steps to do that including the domain verification.)
3. Go to www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com
4. Dashboard > your app should be listed here. Click on it.
5. myappid settings page > Web address > Add new URL
6. Simply enter www and click Add
7. Using your domain hosting provider's web interface, add a CNAME for www for your domain and point to ghs.googlehosted.com

Now you have www.mydomain.com linked to your app.

I wished this would have been more obvious in the documentation...Good luck!

[update 2015-09-28] Now Google lets you add custom domains (including naked domains) and setup SSL without the need of Google Apps. For details refer to here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/using-custom-domains-and-ssl?hl=en

I just discovered today (as of 2014-04-11) a new custom domain settings page is available from Google Developers Console:

1. Go to https://console.developers.google.com/project 2. Click on your project 3. On the left click "App Engine" 4. Click "Settings"

There you go! You can configure custom domain without the need of Google App account!

[Update April 2016] This answer is now outdated, custom naked domain mapping is supported, see Lawrence Mok's answer.

See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=91077 for the details. Once you have signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain:

# Sign in to the Google App Engine admin console.
# Go to Administration > Versions
# Click the 'Add Domain...' button under Domain Setup.
# Enter your domain name in the 'Domain Name:' field
# Click 'Add Domain'. You will be directed to the Google Apps administrator console to complete the process.
# Log in to the Google Apps control panel with your administrator account.
# Accept the terms and specify the access URL you'd like to provide for your application.
# Click 'Accept

You can't use a naked domain, though, such as whatever.com (but www.whatever.com does work), because:

Due to recent changes, Google App Engine no longer supports mapping your app to a naked domain. If your domain registrar supports URL redirects, you can redirect from http://yourdomain.com to your app, which can be served from domains like http://www.yourdomain.com or http://appid.yourdomain.com.

as specified at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=91080

If like me you have seen this message while trying to add 'www' as a subdomain inorder to get your own domain working:

'Already used, please remove previous mapping first . '

The above process mentioned in other answers has changed slightly if you are using Google Apps for your domain.

You must now do this as well:

Google Apps -> Service Settings -> Sites. Click 'Web address mapping' and remove the 'www' mapping which has been added by default to Sites.

Then you can add the 'www' subdomain for your App engine app

see this link:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/web/deleting-existing-www-mapping-from-google-apps

Another solution which is given by Google is URL forwarding: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en-in&answer=61057

Google does offer naked domain redirection.

• Login to your google apps account and select "manage this domain"
• Navigate to Domain settings
• Within Domain Setings, navigate to Domain names
• There's a link that says "change the A record". Clicking that will give you the destination IPs for the A records you need to create.

Google does not provide an IP for us to set A record. If it would we could use naked domains.

There is another option, by setting A record to foreign web server's IP and that server could make an http redirect from e.g domain.com to www.domain.com (check out GiDNS)