Is there an equivalent to ALIAS/ANAME?

Question

I am trying to get an SSL certificate on my custom domain on Heroku and the last thing it told me to do is add the following records:

Domain               Record Type  DNS Target
───────────────────  ───────────  ─────────────────────────────────
www.gethomesync.com  CNAME        www.gethomesync.com.herokudns.com
gethomesync.com      ALIAS/ANAME  gethomesync.com.herokudns.com

But my domain registrar GoDaddy doesn't have an option to add ALIAS or ANAME. I don't know much about DNS having only done quite basic tasks as and when I've needed them, is there an equivalent to ALIAS/ANAME that I can use through GoDaddy?

Thanks

Answer 1

You don't need to set up ALIAS/A record, just create a CNAME record pointing to gethomesync.herokussl.com (you can check the endpoint name with heroku certs Heroku Documentation):

Type Name Value

CNAME www gethomesync.com.herokudns.com

To create a naked domain (removes the need to write www) you need to forward your gethomesync.com to wwww.gethomesync.com:

Under Forwarding click on Domain -> 'Manage' -> then click 'Add Forwarding'

'Forward to' should be wwww.gethomesync.com (your domain) 'Redirect type' should be '301 'Forward settings' should be 'Forward only'

Answer 2

A warning here. As pointed by @NikitaAvvakumov and @deviant in some comments, the accepted answer is not correct.

As mentioned in Heroku docs,

Root domains on Heroku require the use of "CNAME-like" records, often referred to as ALIAS or ANAME records.

Without these records,

Requests to https://example.com will fail with an SSL error.

Again, even if you choose to redirect from your root domain to a subdomain (ex: from example.com to www.example.com), it will only work for non-SSL requests. Any request to https://example.com will fail with an SSL error.

A simple solution to that would be to use another DNS host. For example, I use CloudFlare (the free plan is more than enough and offers great features) which uses what is called CName flattening that works with Heroku like having an ALIAS (they use this by default - you don't have to do anything else than configuring your nameservers and adding DNS records. You can check both Heroku and CloudFlare for tutorials - it's pretty easy).