Wildcard Domains with GoDaddy

Question

I've read Heroku's documentation:

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains#wildcard_domains

They say to add:

To use with a custom domain, configure your DNS registrar to point *.yourdomain.com at yourapp.heroku[app].com.

In GoDaddy, you can't do:

*.yourdomain.com

in the name field. I've heard you can get around that by doing:

**

However, I tried that, but it's not working.

When I run this in console:

 host anysub.yourdomain.com

I get:

 Host anysub.yourdomain.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

What could be the problem? I'm guessing the wildcard isn't set up in GoDaddy correctly?

(FYI: I swapped out yourdomain.com for my actual domain.)

Answer 1

Go to GoDaddy's DNS Manager, the first table on top should say A(Host), click the button under that first table that says Quick Add. In the first text field, enter an asterisk (*), in the second one, the IP address to redirect to (the same one you have for the @ record on top). Click "Save Zone File" on top-right and confirm.

This creates a catch-all record to anysub.yourdomain.com.

Good luck.

Answer 2

I just tried it today and it seems that it's now possible to create wildcard cnames in GoDaddy.

GoDaddy > ... > DNS Manager -> Zone File Editor (Edit Zone)

Then under CNAME (Alias) panel > Quick Add

Host: *
Points to: yourapp.herokuapp.com

Or

Host: *.dev.herokuapp.com
Points to: yourapp.herokuapp.com

Then click on "Save Zone File" and wait a few minutes.

I remember getting this "Host not found 3(NXDOMAIN)" error myself not so long ago. Not anymore. Any subdomain other than those listed explicitly in either A or CNAME are redirected as expected.