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I have a google app engine hosted website and I want my app to have it's own custom domain. How do I go about doing that?

(I realize this question has been asked before, but I am including it again to give a more in-depth answer to the answers already given about this topic.)

yoonjesung
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    IMHO it's always better to check the current official procedure, which may change (in fact it changed a couple of times in the past year alone), not a simplified and possibly soon-to-be-out-of-date copy/version of it. Easy to google for it, in case its URL also changes, presently it's here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/using-custom-domains-and-ssl#adding_a_custom_domain_for_your_application. – Dan Cornilescu Apr 12 '16 at 05:45

2 Answers2

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Perform the following steps:

  1. Go to the Google Cloud Platform Console
  2. Go to App Engine -> Settings -> Custom Domains
  3. Select Add custom domain
  4. Verify your domain ownership according to Step 1
  5. Select the domain you wish to use for this app in Step 2
  6. Login to your domain management and configure the domain as described in Step 3

If you do not own a domain since before you must buy one, there is an option to do that from Google if you click "Register a new domain" instead of "Add custom domain" in step 3. But any domain registrar would work really.

Robin Andersson
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To add your own custom domain, you first have to purchase a domain (there are several domain providers out there, and Google provides domains for purchase as well)

After purchasing a domain, go to your console of Google App Engine. The way I usually get there is by doing the following:

  1. Go to console.cloud.google.com (you will be prompted to sign-in to your google account at this step if you have not already)
  2. Click the top-left drop-down menu (products & services)
  3. In the drop-down menu, scroll to "Compute" and select "App Engine" (this will take you to the app engine dashboard)
  4. Go to settings (last link in the app engine menu)
  5. Once in the settings page, select "Custom domains" (located next to application settings and SSL certificates)
  6. Select "Add a custom domain"

Once on this page, in step 1, type in your domain that you purchased (example.com) and click "verify". This will lead you through a process that will verify that you own this domain. Google provides pretty good detailed instructions on how to do this. Note: if you own a domain that was purchased through Google that is on the same account as your google app engine account, you (usually) do not have to do this step since google will already have verified that you own this domain.

After step 1 of this process, step 2 is fairly simple. Select the type of domain you would like to add (the second option "CNAME" will already be pre-selected for you).

  • If using the second "CNAME" option, type in the subdomain you would like to use for your website (generally, this is going to be 'www') and select "Add". After this, configure your domain DNS by going to the console of your domain provider and adding a new CNAME type DNS address with 'www' as the host (or whatever you decided to use as your subdomain) and ghs.googlehosted.com as the DNS address (or whatever google app engine tells you to put in step 3 of the custom domains page).
  • If you want to add a naked domain (first option) ('A' and 'AAAA' type DNS address) as well, that's easy! Select the first bullet point option and click "Add". In step 3, you will be given the resource records that you need to add in your domain hosts DNS configuration page. Make sure you type in the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses exactly!

Your new, shiny custom domain should (hopefully) be up and running within 1 hour (48 hours max)!

Note: Verify that your naked domain and/or CNAME domain addresses were properly added to google app engine by refreshing the "custom domains" page. If you do not see the records listed, then you either forgot to click "Add" in step 2 of adding a custom domain, or there was an error. Try signing out and signing back in if this occurs.

yoonjesung
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