How to link godaddy domain with AWS Elastic Beanst

Question

I'm running into this problem trying to link my Godaddy domain with an AWS Elastic Beanstalk instance. I found a lot of documentation on how to link an EC2 instance with a domain on Godaddy but not for Elastic Beanstalk instance. So I ended up with this URL: www.MY_SITE.elasticbeanstalk.com

Here is what I did for an EC2 instance:

1. I updated the Nameservers on my Godaddy domain with the ones from my Route 53 Hosted Zone.
2. I created a new Elastic IP on the EC2 console.
3. I went back to Godaddy and updated the DNS A @ field from their DNS Manager, with the EC2 Elastic IP one.
4. You normally have to wait 1h to 48h and it should work.

How can I do the same for a AWS Elastic Beanstalk instance, not an EC2 one? I can't see the instance I created from my EC2 console in order to link it to an Elastic IP.

Hope this is clear enough.. Any help?

Answer 1

You should add a CNAME record to your Godaddy domain name that maps from www.yourGoDaddyDomain.com -> MY_SITE.elasticbeanstalk.com.

That will direct requests to your domain name to the load balancer that is running in your elastic beanstalk environment. You don't want to route your domain name to a specific server (i.e. an elastic IP), you want it to go to the load balancer and that will route requests to your server(s). Since AWS Load balancers don't use IPs (they use domain names), you don't want to set up an A record for this - a CNAME record maps domain names to domain names.

Look at the "Adding or Editing CNAMEs" section of the GoDaddy documentation on how to do this.

Answer 2

Your route53 configuration has to point to the load balancer, not the ec2 instance

Answer 3

No need to create a CNAME or do any forwarding - this is bad from the point of SEO and not recommended by Amazon. Even you should not point a record to IP directly - it will cause a lot of troubles in the future because IP can be changed any moment.

The most elegant way is to migrate DNS service from GoDaddy to Route 53. You still will be with GoDaddy, but handling requests for your site will be on Amazon's side.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Create a new Hosted Zone for your site in Route 53 console:

2. Open newly added domain name, find NS record and copy servers:

3. In GoDaddy's Domain Manager export records via "Export Zone File (Windows)".

4. Import those records to Route 53 ("Import Zone File" button).

5. In GoDaddy's Domain Manager set custom DNS nameservers, obtained on the 2nd step:

Migrating might take some time (even days). Now you can link you domain with your Elastic Beanstalk site. To do so select/create proper A record type in Route 53 and set Alias for it:

Hope it helps.

Answer 4

Here's what I did when I was facing the problem of linking a GoDaddy domain with AWS ElasticBeanstalk.

DNS Manager:

• A record @: 64.202.189.170 (that is GoDaddy's forwarding IP btw)
• Cname www: AWS EB domain (e.g. awseb-xyz.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com)

Forwarding:

• Forward Domain to www.example.com (forward only, without masking)
• Forward Subdomain to AWS EB domain (e.g. awseb-xyz.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com) (with masking)

In order to access the site without www (e.g. http://example.com), I had to set up the forwarding of the domain to the www cname. This www cname then gets forwarded to the AWS EB domain (with masking in order to keep www.example.com in the address bar).