Custom Domains for Zappa Projects

For web applications, a custom domain is crucial. Doing so with AWS is easy enough. This guide will help you set up your Zappa project to have a custom domain.

First things first, do you own a domain? If so, you'll follow this guide exactly.

The general goal is to

Setup your domain in AWS Route53
Get a https certificate on AWS ACM using us-east-1 regardless of any other settings
Add your newly ACM certified domain to your API Gateway
Update your Zappa settings to be configured for above.

Setup Suggestions

Below are related articles to this post. Overall, it should function without them but it's nice to know they exist. Good luck.

1. Domain Name Required.

Associating a custom domain name (with https nonetheless) for your Zappa project is pretty straight forward but first you're going to want to make sure you have one.

Buying a new domain name? The easiest way is to use Route53
Have a domain name? Just follow the setup process below

2. Setup your Domain in Route53

Go to Route53
Click "Hosted Zones"
Click "Create hosted zone"
Add in your domain name joincfe.com (not www.joincfe.com or somethingelse.joincfe.com)
Click "Create"

After it's created, you'll see 4 records for the NS type. This means nameserver

You'll use these 4 records to update your nameservers for your domain. If you bought your domain on name.com:

Login to your account on name.com
Click the domain you'll be using (it must match what you put in Route53)
Click on 'Nameservers'
Delete all pre-existing nameservers. (Or keep track of your old ones if you need to revert for some reason)

Allow for a little time to pass to ensure Route53 has appropriate control over your domain.

3. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)

This allows you to have free https certificates from AWS (assuming you use a public certificate)

Go to ACM
In the top right ensure it says N. Virginia for us-east-1 as your region
Click 'Request a certificate'
Ensure Request a public certificate is checked.
Click 'Request a certificate'
Add in your domain name including subdomains. I recommend also including the wildcard so it's easier to make subdomain changes if you need. You could also just use www. What I did:

joincfe.com
www.joincfe.com
*.joincfe.com

Click "next"
For validation method, choose the option for using Route53 automatically. This makes things more simple.
Finish issuing setup
Make note of your ARN for you certificate, something like arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:531312223:certificate/asdf3c1a-4aab-8d6e-asdfads331

4. Setup API Gateway to Custom Domain

This is the key part to ensure you're custom domain is working for Zappa.

Go to API Gateway
In the top right ensure it says the correct region you used in your Zappa project. Mine is Oregon and us-west-2; I had to switch over from the ACM step.
You may have to click Get started to see the sidebar.
Look for your zappa project under API, mine is named zappacfe-dev, just ensure it's there otherwise you might be in the wrong region
Click Custom Domain Names
Add each domain (including subdomain) you want to use. Keep in mind you'll have to update this in the future if you add subdomains.
First one, I did the following:

Domain Name: www.joincfe.com
Endpoint Configuration: Edge Optimized
ACM Certificate (us-east-1): joincfe.com (someID131)

Notice the last part of ACM Certificate, that is the one we just created. If you don't see it, there was an error in the previous step.

5. Setup Route 53 for your new Target Domain Names from API Gateway

Navigate to API Gateway
Click Custom Domain Names
Locate Target Domain Name for each subdomain you have (even if it's just one). Example:

www.joincfe.com

Target Domain Name
adfddplocbkjhd.cloudfront.net

Hosted Zone ID
Md13TNDATAQYW2

Each subdomain will have a Target Domain Name, copy this value.

Navigate to Route53
Select your domain name
Click "Create Record Set"
Add the following:

**Name**: www.joincfe.com

**Type**: A - IPv4 Address

**Alias** Yes 

**Alias Target**  Paste in the *target domain name* from above, mine was `adfddplocbkjhd.cloudfront.net`

Click "Create"

Repeat this process for each subdomain you have. (such as joincfe.com, blog.joincfe.com, course.joincfe.com, etc)

6. Update zappa_settings.json

Add the domain and certificate_arn key/value pairs like I have below. These are all coming from [this post], [this post], and this post.

{
    "dev": {
        "aws_region": "us-west-2",
        "django_settings": "zapdj.settings",
        "profile_name": "default",
        "project_name": "zappacfe",
        "runtime": "python3.6",
        "s3_bucket": "my-awesome-zappa-bucket",
        "timeout_seconds": 900,
        "manage_roles": false,
        "role_name": "ZappaDjangoRole",
        "role_arn": "arn:aws:iam::908424941159:role/ZappaDjangoRole",
        "vpc_config" : {
            "SubnetIds": ["subnet-449a6c1f", "subnet-55c3a61c", "subnet-779fdd10"],
            "SecurityGroupIds": [ "sg-0cab7e25f83e3e46b" ]
        },
        "domain": "joincfe.com",
        "certificate_arn": "arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:531312223:certificate/asdf3c1a-4aab-8d6e-asdfads331"
    }
}

7. Update Django and Zappa

Add your domain to ALLOWED_HOSTS in Django settings. Such as:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['24phrejind.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com', '.joincfe.com']

Notice I used a . before joincfe.com so the the domain is treated as a wildcard according to django (basically use .joincfe.com instead of *.joincfe.com)

And finally, update Zappa

(zappaCFE-LnWEDIxd) bash-3.2$ zappa update dev

8. Update Base Mappings

Navigate to API Gateway
Click Custom Domain Names
Find your newly added domain name(s)
Click "Edit"
Click "Add mapping"
Click "Destination"'s dropdown
Click your API project (mine is zappacfe-dev
Add the "dev" stage, click "save"

Repeat for any other custom domain names for this project.