Custom Domains

By default, Launch generates a unique URL of the form example.contentstackapps.com for every environment. Each environment is assigned to a unique subdomain at contentstackapps.com.

To make your site easy to access and remember, you need a human-friendly domain name. Contentstack Launch allows you to add custom domains to your environment. Follow the steps below to configure your custom domain.

Note: Custom subdomains must not exceed 63 characters. For example, www.example.com, www.example.org, subdomain.example.in

Adding Apex Domains with Redirects

Contentstack Launch supports redirection-only services for apex domains, following industry best practices. Rather than serving traffic directly from the apex domain (e.g., example.com), many top websites redirect users to a subdomain like www.example.com.

This approach offers several key advantages:

• Improved Security: Segregating content delivery and domain management helps reduce the attack surface and enhances overall security.
• Enhanced Flexibility: Easily switch infrastructure or hosting setups without impacting the user-facing subdomain.
• Consistent User Experience: Delivering content via a subdomain ensures better structure, brand consistency, and trust.
• Improved Performance: Subdomains support CNAMEs, enabling CDNs to route traffic across multiple geolocations for faster content delivery.
• Better Cookie Handling: Cookies set on the apex domain apply to all subdomains, which can pose a security risk in multi-tenant systems. Redirecting helps isolate this behavior.
• SEO Benefits: Redirecting to a single subdomain helps avoid duplicate content issues, supporting cleaner SEO practices.

In this setup, Launch ensures that all content is exclusively served from the designated subdomain, providing users with a seamless and efficient hosting solution for their websites. To configure apex domain redirection to the subdomain, please contact the Launch support team.

Add a Custom Subdomain

Launch lets you add custom subdomains to your environments for more flexible domain management.

Follow the steps below to add a custom subdomain to an existing domain. In this example, we will configure a subdomain for example.com.

1. Click the project card to open your project from the Launch landing page.
2. In the Environments screen, click an existing environment or create a new environment. We will add a custom domain to the Default environment for this tutorial.
3. In the Default environment, click the ellipses under Actions and then click Settings to go to the Settings page.

   

4. In Environments under Settings, click Domains. 
   
5. Click the + New Domain button.
6. In the Domain Name field, enter the subdomain name in the following format: <name>.<apex domain>
   For example: www.example.com, domain.example.com
   After entering the subdomain name, the DNS Details section gets auto-populated as shown below:The Value field displays the default subdomain.

   Note: The DNS details are different for the apex domain and the custom subdomain.

7. Click the copy icon next to the Name and Value fields to copy the CNAME record details.
8. Paste the copied CNAME record details to your domain provider platform.
   Below are some documentation links to common DNS providers for adding the CNAME record:
   1. Go-Daddy
   2. Bluehost
   3. Namecheap

      Depending on your domain provider, these changes can take up to 48 hours to take effect.

9. Click the Create Custom Domain button.
   You can see the newly created subdomain listed in the Domains page.