mvantellingen/apex-redirector repository overview

⁠apex-redirector

Apex-redirector is a simple utility which proxies tcp data (HTTP and HTTPS via SNI) to a target host which then can redirect the user to the correct subdomain. This solves the issue that DNS servers don't allow CNAME on the apex domain (also known as the "root domain" or "naked domain"). CNAME records are required for various cloud providers since e.g. AWS CloudFront or the ELB only have dynamic ip addresses.

It is required to host this application on a server with a static ip address (or behind the AWS Network Load Balancer).

⁠How it works

The apex-redirector first checks the value of the TXT record _apex_redirector.<domain> to see if it is allowed to act as a proxy. It uses hmac 256 to see if the value matches the apex domain + secret key. If it a match it then opens a connection to www.<domain> and forwards the tcp request there (so it acts as a proxy!). The HTTP hostname header is not altered so your target application should always redirect the user manually to www.<domain>

The TXT value is a base64 encoded sha256 hmac key, use for example http://dinochiesa.github.io/hmachash.html⁠ to calculate it.