Domains on Northflank

You can add your own domains to your Northflank team to use with your applications and services. There are many ways to configure your domains on Northflank to allow flexibility, security, and dynamic provisioning of subdomains.

After adding your domain to Northflank you can then add subdomains and configure paths for them, which can then be linked to ports. You can enable CDNs for your subdomains to cache and serve content.

You can add domains with wildcard redirect routing and certificate generation to enable dynamic provisioning of subdomains on Northflank.

To add and use subdomains on Northflank you must first add and verify the root domain on your DNS provider.

Once you have added a subdomain to your team it can be linked and unlinked to your service's ports using paths without having to configure it again in your DNS provider.

If you want to make a port on a service publicly accessible without adding your own domain, you can use the subdomain generated by Northflank.

Follow guides on how to add and verify your domains from different DNS providers.

You can use path-based routing on subdomains to route requests to specific paths to different ports and services, and configure settings for how requests to that path are handled.

Northflank uses Let's Encrypt to provision TLS certificates on-demand, generated by Let's Encrypt. Certificates are created automatically and renewed before they expire, with 2048-bit RSA encryption.

Your custom domains can be linked to a service port and immediately start serving secure traffic with a managed Let's Encrypt certificate.

Your custom domains will be subject to Let's Encrypt's rate limits . These limits include the following:

• Certificates per registered domain: you can request 50 certificates per week for the same registered domain. This limit is applied to the root domain, and any subdomains will count towards the same limit. For example, subdomain1.example.com and subdomain2.example.com will both count towards the limit for example.com.
• New orders: you can order 300 certificates per account, per 3 hours, a new order is created every time you request a certificate

Please keep these limits in mind when creating new subdomains on Northflank and generating Let's Encrypt certificates for your domains via other channels.

You can reduce the number of certificates you need to generate by configuring a domain to use wildcard certificates. Wildcard certificates allow your subdomains to share a certificate, and are ideal for dynamically generating subdomains in Northflank templates and preview environments.

You can configure wildcard redirect routing to add subdomains without adding DNS records for each new subdomain.

You can combine this with wildcard certificate generation to dynamically add subdomains in Northflank templates and preview environments.

You can use a CDN to serve static content from your deployments. This can improve the speed at which your content is delivered to users without needing to deploy in multiple regions, and can reduce the load on your containers from serving many simultaneous requests.

Using a CDN also means that your can deliver stale content, so your site will remain accessible even if your deployments becomes unavailable.

Applications that you write or deploy with a microservices or client-server architecture (for example, separate front and back-ends) will often require CORS access, which only accepts requests from specified domains.

Requests between your services, or even requests to the same service on different ports, may fail unless configured correctly. You may need to add the accepted domains as build arguments or environment variables to your services.

Some applications may have stricter policies and only accept requests from the same root domain. Northflank-generated *.code.run domains for public ports, even if they are on the same service, will be considered as different root domains. You should use your own subdomains for production services.

You can also configure your own CORS policies for individual paths on your own subdomains.