Earlier this week, I wanted to set up a root domain to point at a subdomain. The obvious reason for this is that I wanted a page to load whether a user types in example.org or www.example.org. I had tried this back in 2019 with my projects page, albeit with no success. This may have been due to my own lack of knowledge, or my impatience, or the lack of affordances of GoDaddy; whatever it was, I could not get it to work.

Fast forward six years and I need to do this again, but this time it’s a bit higher stakes because it’s for a work project. In the meantime, I had moved on from GoDaddy to Namecheap, mostly because of discussions on the Code4Lib Slack, where the preferences for Namecheap were clear. Namecheap also allows for ALIAS records, whereas GoDaddy does not. I ultimately used an ALIAS record on the root domain to make the whole thing work.

Setting this up took me about three hours altogether. Much of this time was spent with refreshing the page and wondering if it was propagating. Usually it was not; instead I had made some mistake or another.

In order to get https traffic to redirect from the root domain, I set up a small Flask application there to handle the redirects. This is an improvement on simple forwarding, which is not able to handle https.

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