Blog setup: Domain Name

In my first post I wrote, that the first series of posts will be about the setup of my blog. As I am always curios how things work and what needs to be done to combine all the different pieces, I decided to host my blog in my apartment. Currently, it is running on a linux server, but the ultimate goal is to migrate the blog, to a Raspberry Pi based Kubernetes cluster that I have already running. But as this is further down the road, I will focus for now on the current setup.

First let me show you a high-level overview, how a call from your browser ends up at the server, that is hosting the blog. I simplified especially the part at your end and the involved components within the internet, as this would add additional complexity, which is out of the scope for this post. Nevertheless, it should give you a basic understanding of what is going on. High-level overview of how to access my blog

Domain Name

Let’s get started by talking about domain names. You ended up on my block by either clicking on a link or by entering the URL https://blog.new-bridge.dev into your browser. Each URL consists of three parts:

• the protocol (e.g. https)
• the domain name (e.g. blog.new-bridge.dev)
• the file to display (e.g. index.html)¹

For this post, I will focus on the domain name, but we will come back to the protocol in one of the next posts, especially when talking about how to handle the request within the network of my apartment.

The domain name, among other things, identifies a resource on the internet and is the central piece in the URL. In order to get your own domain name you have to sign-up with a domain name registrar, which allows you to register domain names. Most of the registrars also have additional services like web hosting, mail hosting and so on, so that you don’t need to set up and configure the infrastructure on your own. After some research, I decided to register the new-bridge.dev² domain name at Namecheap.

Now that I had registered a domain name, I needed to make sure, that the requests for that domain are routed to the router in my apartment.

DNS

Traffic on the internet is not routed based on domain names, but instead based on IP addresses. This means, you can also access my blog via 213.55.173.239, which is the IP address that is assigned by my ISP (Internet Service Provider) to my router³. In order to make sure, that all the requests for blog.new-bridge.dev are routed to this IP address, I had to configure the DNS (Domain Name System), using the tooling provided by the registrar. To do so, I added two lines to the configuration to do the job.⁴

First I added an A record, that forwards all the requests for the current domain to the IP address: 213.55.173.239 (@ is a placeholder for the current domain, which in my case will be replaced with new-bridge.dev)

@    IN A     213.55.173.239  ;

In addition to the first record, I added a CNAME record, that forwards all the requests for blog.new-bridge.dev to new-bridge.dev

blog IN CNAME new-bridge.dev. ;

After these changes were activated⁵, each request to my domain (independent of the protocol), started being forwarded to my router. The next step, was to configure the router, so that all the requests are forwarded to the linux server. But I will tell you more about this in the next post.

Thanks for reading!