Latest on Mapping a Naked Domain to Google App

Question

I created a new App and was able to map www.sitename.com to my google app. Once upon a time you could also "redirect the naked domain" name in the google apps domain admin (i.e. sitename.com) but this does not appear to be possible in the admin console any more. The button button to do this is missing now. Any ideas where it went?

I can get the site to come up no problem when I call the www.sitename.com address, however if I request the sitename.com I get a 404 error page from GAE.

I've tried setting up A records with the bare domain pointing to google, but this does not seem to be working.

Is is even possible to make a naked domain to google apps anymore. Any ideas of anything else I can try? Has anyone else ran into this issue in lately?

I'm using Netfirms and they provide DNS for for my domains too. I don't seem to have url forwarding on Netfirms.

Answer 1

Naked domain (e.g. yourdomain.com) support for App Engine can be setup in three steps:

1. Setup a naked domain redirect to a subdomain of your choice (e.g. redirect mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com). See the App Engine FAQ, which instructs you to configure the redirect via the Google Apps control panel for your domain.

2. Configure App Engine to serve traffic for your custom subdomain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com) via the Google Apps control panel.

3. (Optionally), setup SSL for your custom domain. This step is required if you which to serve https traffic, but not required if you only plan

Answer 2

Just found the link is missing for a new domain I'm trying to set up for Appengine.

Hopefully Google make the link re-appear, otherwise you'll need a web server somewhere that you can get to do the forwarding for you.

• Set up a DNS A record to point example.com to the IP adress of your web server.

• Configure your webserver to do a permanent redirection of example.com to www.example.com. This will depend on your web server - for Apache, add a virtual host file to sites-available like this:

  <VirtualHost *>
      Redirect permanent / http://www.example.com/
      servername example.com
      ServerAdmin [email protected]
      ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
      CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
  </Virtualhost>
  

  Google for more details for your web server.

Answer 3

here's what i'm doing. i bought a domain name (and that's it) from mediatemple. i wanted a naked url redirect (example.com -> www.example.com) but GAE's naked URL redirect will only work if your site is being served from www.example.com. in my case, my site/app was actually being served from GAE itself, so the naked URL redirection will not work (see the little caution paragraph at the top of this page: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2518373)

however, the stackoverflow answer at this link (http://bit.ly/10zA67m) pointed me to wwwizer.com which is a free service that allows simple naked url redirects. i just set it up and it seems simple enough. i'm not yet certain if it's working (i just updated the dns zone file a few minutes ago), but if it does end up working, this service will help me out a lot.

UPDATE
after a few hours, the naked url redirecting provided by wwwizer.com is working. sweet! reliability is TBD, but i'm hopeful.