Setting Up A Domain
Until this point in time, I was falling back on the GitLab Pages domain. There is nothing wrong with this domain. It was as personal as my GitLab username. However, it was missing a personalization aspect that I want. So why not buy a domain and use that instead? Seems like it is doable from what I have seen so far. So why not experiment with a couple of dollars.
First up, the hardest part. What is the best domain that fits the criteria? Wait..? There are criteria? Initially, my concerns were:
- Cost
- Professional appearance
- HTTP
With that in mind, I took searching GoDaddy for the perfect option. After about an hour of haggling around I settled on andrew-schwabe.com. Now that the domain was mine. It was time to put it to use. That means setting up the DNS records. GoDaddy made this pretty simple, it is a simple table to add information into. But, what information do I have to add?
We are in luck! GitLab has documentation for this. Following through with the documentation. There were in total of 4 DNS records to modify, 2 A records and 2 TXT records. With the DNS saved, I opened a new browser, entered in the new domain name. Voila! Worked like a charm.
But, what about HTTPS support? How does that get set up? GitLab made this really quite easy. Can you toggle a setting? Then you can enable HTTP for a GitLab Page. The same domain setup document above it describes where the setting lives in the domain configuration.
That is all there was to set up a custom domain. Full transparency, it took longer to select a domain name than it did to get the configuration in place to use a domain.