Domains¶
Every Uberspace account gets its own domain in the form of $USER.uber.space. You can setup as many additional domains as you like.
Tip
Uberspace is strictly a hosting provider, which is why we don’t offer domain registrations. You can, of course, use any domain that you registered with an external domain provider with your Uberspace account. At the end of this article is a list of some popular domain providers.
Setup¶
In order to use your own domain for web with your Uberspace, you need to first set it up using our uberspace tool. You can only add fully qualified domain names (FQDNs), wildcard domains are not available, because let’s
encrypt does not support wildcard domains in conjunction with HTTP validation.
[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain add isabell.example
The webserver's configuration has been adapted.
Now you can use the following records for your DNS:
A -> 185.26.156.55
AAAA -> 2a00:d0c0:200:0:b9:1a:9c:37
Note
If you want to add or remove an internationalized domain name (IDN), please use the ASCII representation (“punycode”). For example, please use xn--berspace-55a.de instead of überspace.de.
To convert an internationalized domain name to punycode, use the idn command:
[isabell@stardust ~] $ idn überspace.de
xn--berspace-55a.de
If locale inside your uberspace shell is not set correctly, this command can fail with a “could not convert” error message. To fix this, either configure your local terminal to use an UTF-8 locale or call idn like so: LANG=en_US.utf8 idn ....
Once you’ve set up your domain using the uberspace tool, the tool provides you with the A and AAAA records that need to be configured in your registrar’s nameserver.
Note
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a directory used to look up information about a host name. It usually includes at least a so-called A record, which contains the IPv4 address assigned to this host. The AAAA record does the same for IPv6 addresses. If the domain should be able to receive e-mails, a mail exchange server is specified in the MX record.
There are other types of DNS records used to specify various services for this domain. Wikipedia provides a list if you’re curious.
To start publishing content on your new domain, upload it to /var/www/virtual/isabell/html or /home/isabell/html. By default, all domains
share the same docroot. Please refer to docroot for instructions on how to use serve different content under a given domain.
Subdomains¶
Any subdomain that you wish to use needs to be added individually. So in order to also use www.isabell.example, you need to run uberspace web domain add www.isabell.example as well. You can also add subdomains for your isabell.uber.space domain.
Because we check on each host if a domain is already under control of another user of that host, you might encounter an error if you try to add a subdomain with another user than the one you used to configure the same main domain:
[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain add example.com
[..]
[isabell2@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain add sub.example.com
Can't add domain to the configuration. It is a subdomain of a domain already configured for another Uberspace account.
Then you can just add the subdomain first on the one user and then the main domain on the other user.
Note
We very much encourage you to use separate Uberspace accounts for separate projects or apps and so for subdomains. And you shouldn’t usually run into this problem because in most cases you won’t end up with different users on the same host.
Note that you will also encounter this error if the main domain is configured as a mail domain (and not as web domain) on another Uberspace account.
Removal¶
To remove a domain, use the uberspace tool:
[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain del isabell.example
The server's configuration has been adapted.
Listing¶
If you want to find out which domains are currently set up for the web server on your Uberspace account, use the uberspace command:
[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain list
isabell.example
isabell.uber.space
This will list all domains and sub-domains currently set up for this account, including the default $USER.uber.space.