Add Domain Name

Quick reference

• 00:03 Okay, so we've got our app, it's live on Heroku.
• 00:06 But we've got this kind of weird domain name, djangoresume2.herokuapp.com, and
• 00:11 that's fine, this is the free tier.
• 00:13 And that's okay if that's all you want, but
• 00:14 if you want your own domain name, how do you do that?
• 00:15 Well, it's actually pretty easy and that's what we're going to do in this video.
• 00:21 So, this is basically a two-step process,
• 00:23 we need to tell Heroku that we want to use a domain name.
• 00:26 And then we need to actually point our domain name from our registrar to Heroku.
• 00:32 Now, if you're not familiar with domain names, you buy them from a registrar,
• 00:36 they're usually about $10 a year.
• 00:38 You have to renew them every year, and the place you buy them from is a registrar,
• 00:42 and there are a bunch of those, I mean, hundreds of them.
• 00:45 You may have heard of GoDaddy, that's a registrar where you register domain names.
• 00:49 I use something called Namecheap, it's really cheap, it's probably one of
• 00:53 the cheapest ones out there, but they're a really, really good company.
• 00:57 Google has their own registrar, Google Domains, so it really doesn't matter which
• 01:02 registrar you use, but they're all going to be slightly different.
• 01:06 So I'm going to show you how to do it on Namecheap.
• 01:08 If you use somebody else, you're going to have to just google something
• 01:11 like GoDaddy, or Heroku domains, or something like that.
• 01:15 You'll see a little tutorial more than likely, and it'll show you how to do it.
• 01:18 But I'll show you how to do it on mine, and
• 01:20 you should be able to figure out how to do it on yours just from that.
• 01:23 So the first thing we need to do is head over to Heroku, and login to your account,
• 01:27 now I'm already logged in.
• 01:29 So it lists all the apps, I have three pages of apps.
• 01:32 What you want to do is just you probably only have one app, but
• 01:35 find it wherever it is.
• 01:36 Here it is right here, djangoresume2, and just click on it, and
• 01:40 then go over to Settings.
• 01:41 And if you scroll down, you'll see domains, so
• 01:44 we just need to add whatever our domain name is.
• 01:48 So mine is www.elderresume.com,
• 01:52 type in www., whatever your domain is.
• 01:56 It could be .net, .org, dot whatever,
• 01:59 whatever you've purchased from your registrar.
• 02:02 So we'll then go ahead and click Next, and that's all there is to it on Heroku Zand.
• 02:07 So now you have to tell your registrar to point that domain name towards Heroku.
• 02:12 So to do that, log into your registrar and I'm at Namecheap here, and
• 02:16 then just scroll down until you find your domain name.
• 02:19 Here it is elderresume, and I'm going to click on Manage, and
• 02:24 what we want is Advanced DNS.
• 02:26 And inside of here, what we want to do is add a new record.
• 02:30 So I'm going to click add a new record, and
• 02:32 the type of record we want is something called a CNAME.
• 02:36 So when we do that it pops up here.
• 02:38 For host, we want www, and for the target, we want whatever URL, our Heroku app is.
• 02:45 Now mine happens to be djangoresume2.herokuapp.com,
• 02:48 yours will be something different, because we can't have the same names.
• 02:53 If you didn't change the name of it, it's going to be whatever weird word Django
• 02:57 just created for you randomly, and probably a bunch of weird numbers.
• 03:02 So like willowycreek59876.herokuapp.com or whatever.
• 03:08 So just copy that whole thing, and just that, not the HTTPS stuff.
• 03:13 So I'm going to copy this head back over here and
• 03:16 I'm just going to paste it in, all right?
• 03:19 And for TTL, that stands for time to live, it just means how often are we going to
• 03:24 check to make sure this domain name has been updated.
• 03:27 I'm just going to put it at one minute, and then click Save Changes.
• 03:30 Now, like I said, your registrar very likely will look very different than this,
• 03:35 but you're doing the same thing on your registrar.
• 03:37 You're adding a CNAME, the host should be www, the value will be your URL.
• 03:43 And you can put this as one minute if you want or automatic, it just means how fast
• 03:47 it will update, I want it to update right away, so that's all there is to it.
• 03:52 Now, for this to take effect, it's going to take at least one minute, and
• 03:56 then after that it can take up to hours.
• 03:58 Because there are name servers all over the world, and
• 04:02 they all have to be updated, and they update on their own timeframe.
• 04:05 So they tell you it should be updated within 12 hours, for me,
• 04:10 it's usually like a half an hour or less.
• 04:12 One thing you can do to speed it up is to flush your DNS cache on your
• 04:16 local computer.
• 04:17 And that means your computer has a cache of the DNS server database on your
• 04:22 computer, you want to update that right away.
• 04:25 And to do that, just go to your Windows Start menu and type in CMD, and
• 04:28 you're going to get the command prompt.
• 04:30 And you can just type in ipconfig /flushdns, and
• 04:35 this will just flush out your DNS cache, and you can exit.
• 04:41 So now, if some time goes by, or if you want to check it right away,
• 04:46 just type in www.elderresume, or whatever your domain name is.
• 04:52 As you can see, it can't find it yet because it hasn't updated yet.
• 04:55 But usually probably within a half an hour, I just hit Reload and it worked.
• 04:59 So I clicked Shift, I held down the Shift key, and
• 05:03 I clicked Reload, that forces a reload.
• 05:06 And when I did that, boom, it works, so it works, our domain name is live.
• 05:10 And just that easy, and like I said,
• 05:12 domain names cost like 10 bucks, they're not very expensive, so that's pretty cool.
• 05:16 So that's all for this video, in the next video,
• 05:20 we'll do a little bit of review, we'll recap some stuff, and go from there.

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