How can I set up my domain name on Google App Engine?

Question

I've made a website to go on App Engine, and have deployed it. I've redirected my domain name to ghs.google.com, and it successfully goes to my site.

The problem is that in the address bar, 'www.mysite.com' turns into 'myappid.appspot.com', and I haven't got a clue as to how I make it stay with 'www.mysite.com'.

It seems like such a simple thing, but It's starting to drive me insane!

How do I fix this?

Salol

sounds more like a serverfault question? – Hakon

Answer 1

Have a look at this quick guide, in essence:

Add a CNAME for www.yourdomain.com and point it to ghs.googlehosted.com.

Sign in to your application via appspot.com.

Click the Administration → Application Settings link.

Click the Add Domain... button under the Domain Setup section

Add www.yourdomain.com in the domain name box and click the Add Domain... button

Borodino

Ok, I've managed to get my www.mysite.com going. I'm trying to get just mysite.com going now. I'm trying to follow the dyndns instructions in the link you provided, but I'm not exactly sure how that fits into the big picture. – Salol

'Naked domains' aren't supported in App Engine. The closest you can do is to employ a service that issues 302 redirects from foo.com/* to www.foo.com/*. – Archimedes

Answer 2

With respect to the naked domain question. Please take a look at: http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/general.html#naked_domain and follow the link provided there.

Benzo

Answer 3

The only reason you'd get the behaviour you're describing is if your app is issuing a 301 or 302 redirect from www.mysite.com to mysite.appspot.com. App Engine won't do this itself. If you paste the relevant handler code, perhaps we can spot the issue.

Archimedes

What's up with the downvotes? This is a legitimate - and accurate - answer! – Archimedes

Answer 4

I found that my domain name provider allowed me to do a URL redirect from http://mysite.com to another url, but unfortunately it didn't let me redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com.

I found that it would however let me redirect to http://www.mysite.com/home though, so I've done that. From www.mysite.com/home, I could have done a redirect to www.mysite.com, but I'm not that fussy :)

I think that in my original question, my browser might have been caching things, so when I was playing around it wasn't responding properly. A reset of my history or a ctrl+F5 helped the second time around.

The first answer provides pretty good instructions on the google apps side of things but the link provided really threw me off with the instructions about setting up stuff at dyndns.com (which seems really strange to me). I only needed to touch google apps, and my domain name provider.

Google has some doc as well which I found http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61057

Thanks for everyone's help :)

Salol