Porter secures all Web services with SSL certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt. Porter will automatically handle the issuance and renewal of your certificates.

Porter Domains

Porter generates placeholder domains for all Web services. These placeholder domains follow the format of *.onporter.run. While these domains can be used in production, we highly recommend attaching a custom domain to your production web services.

Custom Domains

Setting up a custom domain involves two steps: setting up a DNS record to point to that domain, and then configuring your Web service to listen on that custom domain:

DNS Setup

You must first find the DNS name assigned to the load balancer of your cluster. This can be found under the Networking tab of your Web Service:

The DNS records that need to be created for your Web service vary slightly depending on the cloud provider and the DNS provider you are using.

Copy this address, as you will need it to create the DNS record.

Google Cloud and Azure

On Google Cloud and Azure, the load balancer that sits in front of your infrastructure has a static IP address. Therefore, you have to create an A record in your DNS provider that points to that static IP address.

The name of the record should be the subdomain you want to use (e.g. app.mydomain.com), and the value should be the IP address of the load balancer that you copied above.

Amazon Web Services

For clusters deployed on AWS, you need to create a CNAME record that points at the DNS name for your load balancer. Please follow instructions below, based on the type of domain you are creating:

  • Subdomain -> domains of the format *.porter.run such as cloud.porter.run, myapp.porter.run
  • Apex domain -> top level domains, of the format porter.run

Create a CNAME record on your DNS provider for your desired subdomain, which points to the load balancer URL you have copied above. Make sure you exclude the protocol http:// and any trailing / from the URL string. For example, on Route 53, this looks like the following:

Once DNS has propagated, you can now deploy your application using the custom domain!

After you complete the previous steps, it might take up to 30 minutes for DNS records to fully propagate. Please wait before deploying your applications until the DNS propagation is complete. You can check this using tools like dnschecker.org or running nslookup <your-domain>.

Deploying on the Custom Domain

Once the DNS record changes have been propagated, you will be able to attach the custom domain to your application. Click on Add Custom Domain, input the custom domain you have just pointed to the load balancer, then hit deploy.

In a few minutes, you will be able to view the application on the custom domain, secured with an SSL certificate.