Apologies if this is a stupid question. I have searched the docs for the answer to this question and the lack of answers or how-tos makes me feel like I’m missing a fundamental underlying concept.
I have bought the URL pritrix.com via CrazyDomains. I did not select a hosting option with Crazy Domains as I want to run an app i have developed on Anvil.Works. I have signed up for a Personal Plan.
I was able to configure the DNS to point to 52.56.203.177 and then Publish the app to www.pritrix.com but I did not have SSL so my browser injects lots of warning messages about an insecure site, but finally will let me through to see the app. I want to set up SSL so it can be a https://www.pritrix.com
I purchased an SSL cert from Crazy Domains and they have emailed me asking me to create a CSR record in my hosting location.
In my muddled mind I want to host my application on an Anvil server (which I picture as a virtualized server running on a stack of AWS machines in London). So I need to generate the CSR on that server (maybe using something like pyOpenSSL) and then provide it to Crazy Domains. At the same time they are asking me if admin@pritrix.com works which feels like it would be the administrator access to the host server for pritrix.com, but I don’t have one. So I’m quite confused.
Can anyone suggest either the solution to my problem, or some things I should be reading to understand the problem better, or a set of key words I should start googling on that will lead me to get my thinking right?
I thought Anvil basically does this for you, but I could be wrong. See the docs here, which don’t address your specific domain registrar but may be helpful by analogy: Anvil Docs | Custom Domains
The SSL has always taken care of itself once you use the IDE to publish to a domain. There’s a delay, since part of the process has to be done by an Anvil team member, but it should happen without any further action on your part.
Thanks @hugetim and @jshaffstall those were very useful hints. I did some digging, made some changes and have now resolved the problem.
Here is my guess at what was wrong. I had entered www.pritrix.com as the URL on the publish window. In the examples the URL is without the www part so I updated it to just pritrix.com and waited for the change to propagate through the system. Things seem to work fine now. I can access the app from www.pritrix.com or pritrix.com.
As a reminder to myself for next time this happens I think the answer was:
create 2 DNS A Records, one for www.[name here].com and one for [name here].com with both pointing at the Anvil IP address of 52.56.203.177
publish the app in Anvil with the [name here].com URL (not www.[name here].com)
wait for all the changes to work their way through (including SSL being set up)
bob’s your uncle app will be accessible from either www.[name here].com or [name here].com and it will appear as https:// with the nice little green padlock.
There should be information about certificates and TLS in the publishing section. I also wasted my money to buy a certificate that would be useless. Hopefully for me, it was about 2.5$ but there are much more expensive certs on the market, and a would-be very furious to throw 100$ away. Even now I am pissted off
