How to configure Google Domains + Heroku w a Naked Domain

Question

I have a domain loading in a web browser using Heroku and Google Domains. Right now the domain loads with a www: http://www. XXX .com.

If I enter the URL w/o the WWW like http:// XXX .com I get the following error in Chrome: "XXX.com’s server DNS address could not be found"

What do I need to do so that the following happens:

1. This loads - http:// mydomain.com
2. http://www. mydomain.com redirects to http:// mydomain.com

Thank you

Answer 1

IMHO, you should:

1/ Set your heroku domain to be http://example.com. All the info are in the Heroku documentation.

Heroku should serve your site using http://example.com.

2/ You need to redirect in Google Domains your http://www.example.com to http://example.com. To do this, you need to set web forwarding in the Google Domain console under the website tab. The documentation is straight forward.

Any http://www.example.com request should be forwarded to http://example.com.

UPDATE

Due to your needs, I am wondering if the best is not to disable the naked to www redirection, have both domain points to your heroku instance and get a SSL certificate for them (using let's encrypt makes things easy).

Here is a tutorial.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

It's advisable to make the www subdomain the default here, such that the root/naked domain redirects to www. This is in line with Heroku recommendations, which states:

For maximum scalability and resiliency applications should avoid using DNS A-records and instead use a DNS provider that supports CNAME functionality at the apex, or use sub-domains exclusively

You can achieve this with Google Domains Synthetic Records:

• Go to the Synthetic Records section
• Select Subdomain forward
• Enter @ for subdomain, and www.xyz.com for destination