Manual DNS settings

Sometimes manual labor is laborious but do-able.

As explained earlier; you can configure BushFire to either use your DeSec.io account so that you don't have to do all the settings at the DNS of your website's domain. All you need to do is just to point the name-servers of your domain to DeSec.io which is explained here.

This article shows how to manually enter the settings for your domain in any DNS (Even DeSec.io DNS is set in the same fashion by BushFire; without you having to do all this by yourself)

These are the steps you need to do:

1. Go to the DNS which handles your website's domain. Note settings have to be done for the main domain name, even if it you website is on a sub-domain. That means if you were creating a website for whatever.yourdomain.com, you have to make the settings for yourdomain.com Please understand that you CANNOT have duplicate entries. So if you already had an earlier record; that would need to be deleted before adding the changed record.

2. Add the following CNAME record to the DNS:

   1. For the subdomain, enter www if your website is only for yourdomain.com but if it is to be hosted at whatever.yourdomain.com, you would need to enter the subdomain as whatever

   2. For the domain that would point this record to; enter cloudflare-ipfs.com In some DNS systems you would need to end that with a period (i.e a dot) Check the documentation of your DNS

3. Then add the following TXT record into the DNS:

   1. For the subdomain, this time enter _dnslink.www if your website is only for yourdomain.com but if it is to be hosted for whatever.yourdomain.com, then you enter _dnslink.whatever

   2. For the value of that same TXT record, enter the following: dnslink=/ipfs/<QHASH> You need to supply the actual QHash that was obttained after the pinning, for <QHASH> above.

4. For both the above changes there is usually one more parameter that you can give, which is the "ttl" or "Time-to-live" -- Give that value as short as allowed in your DNS system. (See also the conditions of your DNS system, as some will not allow you to give a very low Time-to-live setting) In DeSec.io it is 3600 seconds (i.e. 1 hour)

Once you make those changes and you are sure there are no errors; you may have to wait for a few minutes to a few hours -- it all depends on the way that particular DNS system has been configured.

One final setting to be done on a CloudFlare website

After the DNS settings have propagated; you would still need to do the final step at the CloudFlare page that helps IPFS pinned websites. This is explained in detail towards the end of another article here.