How to use a custom domain with your Akash deployment

Use CloudFlare’s free plan to enable SSL + custom domain names!

3 min readJun 1, 2021

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

Introduction

Just a quick guide on using CloudFlare to enable custom domain names and HTTPS/SSL on your Akash deployment. This assumes that you already have a deployment running, and you have the custom uri from your Akash provider. If you have yet to deploy your application on this great decentralized cloud marketplace, there are tons of guides:

Official Docs
Basic personal site guide from Tom that I personally used
Another great one

After deployment, this is what the uri looks like:

 oq0p3b3t959b185mp83o5bimnk.ingress.sjc1p0.mainnet.akashian.io

Of course, asking people to type that into their browser when sharing your app is just a pain in the butt. Akash deployments also don’t come with SSL certs enabled yet, so we’ll use CloudFlare’s free DNS service for that.

Domain Name

I purchased a domain name with my own name to run my personal site. I used GoDaddy, doesn’t matter which provider you purchase from. This should be pretty simple. There are decentralized alternatives such as handshake as well, but those are slightly more complicated to setup.

Update (As of 31 Aug 2022)

We now need to specify the hostname as an environment variable as well in the Akash deploy.yml file. See the screen capture below for an example obtained from the official docs. It should be the same as the field in ‘expose/accept’

Based on feedback from Medium user sturmenta, thanks!

CloudFlare

Step by step of how I set this up:

Create a CloudFlare account and add your site.

2. Select Free plan if you’re a cheapo like me

3. The next page will let you setup DNS records. Make sure Type is set to CNAME, Name is @, and Target is your deployment uri.

Name should auto populate to your domain name. I added www name to also redirect boomers who type in www at the front of websites.

4. You should get to the overview page on CloudFlare. Navigate to the DNS tab and you should see the CF nameservers.

5. These nameservers need to be copied to your domain provider. In GoDaddy it was pretty simple, just navigate to DNS management and choose ‘update nameservers’. For other domain providers it should be a similar process.