Configuring Domains and DNS Records for ZaneOps

ZaneOps requires specific DNS records to be set up for your domains. The primary environment variables related to domains are:

• ROOT_DOMAIN: Used to generate subdomains for deployed web apps.
• ZANE_APP_DOMAIN: The domain where the ZaneOps dashboard will be accessible after deployment. It can be the same as ROOT_DOMAIN.

Important

You can use any domain you want for services created in ZaneOps, you are not restricted to ROOT_DOMAIN or ZANE_APP_DOMAIN.

For example, your ROOT_DOMAIN might be zaneops.dev and your ZANE_APP_DOMAIN admin.zaneops.dev, but a service can still use a domain like mysupersaas.com.

Required DNS Records

You need to add the following records in your DNS provider:

*     IN  A    <your-server-ip>       # Wildcard Subdomain (`*.<ROOT_DOMAIN>`, to support subdomains dynamically)
app   IN  A    <your-server-ip>       # ZANE_APP_DOMAIN

On cloudflare, it looks like this :

Verifying DNS Records

Ensure that these records are correctly propagated by checking them with a DNS lookup tool such as dig or nslookup :

# Using `dig`
dig +short admin.zaneops.dev A

# Using `nslookup`
nslookup admin.zaneops.dev

ROOT_DOMAIN

This variable is used for generating subdomains for your services.

for example if your root domain is zaneops.dev, urls for your services will be generated as project-service-randomid.zaneops.dev. This variable is also used for generating unique urls for your deployments.

In the dashboard, this is what is used when you leave the domain field empty when you add urls for your service :

Default value

By default the setup script of zaneops generate a sslip.io domain based on the IP of your server (ex: https://198-19-249-134.sslip.io), and you can change this at any moment.

ZANE_APP_DOMAIN

This variable corresponds to the domain where the zaneops dashboard will be accessible. You can safely set this variable to the same value as the ROOT_DOMAIN, the domain itself is not used for anything else.

Default value

By default, the setup script of ZaneOps will generate this with the same value as ROOT_DOMAIN.

Disabling SSL

By default zaneops, will only expose the port 443 to the public, with all services served over https. But in some cases where you have another proxy on top on your server (ex: Cloudflare tunnel, Cloudflare proxy), which handles SSL for you, you might want to disable SSL on your server.

• To enable HTTP, you can modify the .env file and update the MODE variable to http :

  /var/www/zaneops/.env

  # ... other env variables
  MODE=http

• You will need to restart your zaneops instance :

  make stop # stop zaneops and all the services managed by it
  make deploy # start zaneops again

Server without a public IP

In some cases, you might want to disable secure connection to your server, if you are testing on a non production server which doesn’t have a public IP (meaning you can only access your server with http://).

For that you will need to modify the __DANGEROUS_ALLOW_HTTP_SESSION environment variable in your .env file to "true". However, this is strongly discouraged to use in production, as it allows for connecting to your dashboard using non secure cookies.

This can be perfectly OK though, for use-cases like using ZaneOps to host apps on a local network not accessible from the internet.

Using Cloudflare tunnel

Cloudflare tunnel is a popular way to host applications without needing to expose your server IP to the internet.

For hosting zaneops behing cloudflare tunnel, you will need to :

1. Disable ssl
2. Add the records on the public hostname tab on your tunnel instance, all forwarded to http://127.0.0.1:80 :