how to connect cloudflare root domain to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I wish to setup Cloudflare so that both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com will reach the same Elastic Beanstalk host.

I've created a CNAME for the "www" subdomain, it works great. But how do I handle the mydomain.com DNS root entry? It's currently an A record, pointing to some IP, but in order to point to EB, I need to have a CNAME like "www", correct? If so, is it safe to somehow replace the A record with a CNAME despite the fact this is a root DNS entry rather than some subdomain..

thanks.

Answer 1

All you need to do is add a Page Rule

Match: mydomain.com/* and Redirect (301) to https://www.mydomain.com/$1

Or http if you’re not using SSL. The $1 means to copy the path from the original request.

Answer 2

1. Delete the A record from Cloudflare DNS Panel
2. Add a record with type CNAME and value as yourdomainname.com

This doesn't work on most DNS providers. However, Cloudflare has a feature called "CNAME flattening" that allows a CNAME Record to co-exist with other records at a domain's root. In practice, it doesn't act like a CNAME because when someone looks it up, Cloudflare resolves it internally, finds an A Record and returns the value. (This is how Alias A Records work on AWS Route 53, for example.)