Intro to DNS

DNS is simply a naming system for computers so they can know how to talk to one another. The most common analogy for DNS is a phone book. You look up the person (computer) and the entry will tell you how to communicate with them (another computer).

I use Hover for purchasing my domains and also as my DNS. I would like to share how I was able to host my static site on Github Pages but then also have a subdomain point to my Heroku App. Let’s say you have a domain foo.com and would like to have your foo.github.io content served when you go to foo.com. You simply follow these steps.

So far so good. You now have your static site deployed from your foo.github.io repository. Now you have your “bar” repository on Github that you would like to deploy to Heroku. Once you have deployed your app to Heroku, they have docs for how to get started and tutorials many languages, you will have bar.herokuapp.com.

Now in order to serve that up via bar.foo.com, you will need to do a couple of things. You will first need to setup a CNAME record with Hover. Simply add a CNAME record via the DNS tab in your admin console for hostname=”bar”, record type=”CNAME”, and value=”bar.herokuapp.com”. You are good to go with your domain configuration.

After all that is done, you will go back to Heroku and you can run the following command from your terminal heroku domains:add bar.foo.com. This will configure your bar.herokuapp.com to be served via bar.foo.com.