Setting up hover.com settings so that I can use Heroku hosting

Question

Let me preface this by saying Im somewhat self taught with things, and may not use correct terms. I hope that that doesn't hinder getting help. Also, this is my first Stack Overflow question, so have some grace, please... if it's not appropriate formatting, etc.

I'm trying to set up hover.com DNS settings, etc. so that I can enter in a domain name, and then have it point to my myapp.herko.com.

Essentially pointing thisismydomain.com/about -> myapp.heroku.com/about and so on.

I've looked in the hover.com help in re: to domain forwarding, as well as other stack overflow questions related to DNS Simple, hoping that it'd rub off on my inquiry and I'd be able to figure it out.

I'm kind of stumped though. I hope you can help me. I've been doing wordpress stuff for years, and am finally excited about learning Ruby on Rails. I feel like if I can push things quickly via Heroku and see them live on my site, it will be a big boost of confidence in a sometimes bewildering endeavor.

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

Right ok, no worries. We all start somewhere. DNS is full of nasty terms.

Assuming you've already registered thisismydomain.com with Hover and you have a Heroku application called myapp.

In the Hover control panel you want to find the domain, select the domain and click the DNS option in the tab bar to edit the records for it. If you already see www in the list of records you will need to delete it and add it back and when you get the option for record type to create you want to make sure you select CNAME. If it doesn't already exist just use the Add Record button. You will then need to enter a hostname of www and the value should be myapp.herokuapp.com.

Once you've done that you will need to go to your application via the Heroku control panel > Settings and in the Domain section you need to enter www.thisismydomain.com. Once you've done that and the DNS has propogated (it takes a while for changes to DNS to go around the world, sometimes up to 48 hours) going to www.thisismydomain.com should end up on your application.

If you REALLY want to use the domain without a www prefix then I suggest you read:

http://www.neilmiddleton.com/the-dangers-of-a-records-and-heroku/

Custom root domain on Heroku

which attempt to talk you out of it or around it.