Activating your domain
Walk through of the necessary steps
Here we walk through the steps necessary to get a friendly domain working.
In this section, we are going to assume that you will use AWS services. For those not using AWS for registration and DNS services, we'll address this in the next lesson.
Register a domain with Route 53#
AWS makes this pretty straightforward and there is no need to duplicate the instructions here.
See AWS Domain Registration Documentation for step-by-step instructions.
Once you complete the process, for most generic TLDs (like .com) it takes a little while for the processing to complete before you can move on. When I registered zappaguide.com it took about 25 minutes. You will get an email from Amazon Route 53 telling you the registration succeeded. Then you may move on in this lesson.
View the hosted domain#
Now that you have registered your domain, AWS has automatically created a hosted zone for you. This means they are providing DNS services for you. No action is needed on your part, but if you're curious, you can check it out. Here's a screenshot of the console for zappaguide.com.
Request a secure certificate#
Now navigate over to the ACM Service in the AWS Console. We're going to request that AWS generate a digital certificate for our domain.
In the upper right corner of the console, change the region to be "N. Virginia". Strangely, while your Zappa project may run in a different region, you must do these steps in the us-east-1 region.
Now click on Request a certificate.
Select Request a public certificate.
When adding domain names, enter both the bare or apex domain in the top box and one with the www prefix below. For example:
Adding both domains allows you to leverage either URL and have it covered with a single certificate. While you don't necessarily have to do this, it may save you time in the future if you change your mind and decide to use the other domain.
If you're 100% sure you will use only one of the two choices, you may enter that choice as the only domain name. Once the certificate is issued, you cannot change the domain names that it covers. You will have to create a new certificate for any modifications.
At the next step, select DNS Validation. This should be the default.
The next screen prompts for tags. They are optional here.
The next step is to review all the information. Press Confirm and request
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