Quality and Innovation

You’ve got your Hugo site built, and in a public GCS bucket, and you can see it by going to the URL at https://storage.googleapis.com/www.yourdomainname.yourtld — now how can you make http://yourdomainname.yourtld work directly? This post assumes that you’ve already purchased a domain from http://domains.google and you have a Hugo site (or any other web site) set up in a GCS bucket.

Step 1 – Get into the domain administrator panel. Go to http://domains.google and click “My Domains” in the top right of the window.

Step 2 – Find the domain that you want to map to this bucket and click “Manage” on the rightmost side of that line.

Step 3 – Click “Edit DNS Settings” OR “Use custom name servers for your domain” – they both go to the same page.

Step 4 – Scroll down to “Custom Resource Records”:

• In the textbox that says @, type www
• In the dropdown, select CNAME
• Keep 1H in the next textbox
• In the last textbox, type c.storage.googleapis.com. (that last dot is important, too)
• Click Add

Step 5 – Add a Synthetic Record so your “naked domain” (no www) will work. In the “Synthetic Records” section, put an @ in the first box, put http://www.yourdomainname.yourtld in the rightmost box, and click “Forward Path” in the middle group of radio buttons. Click Add and this should make the magic happen.

Step 6 – Wait. They’ll say it takes up to 48 hours for DNS to propagate… it usually takes a lot less. Even though you set up the CNAME to trigger from www, Google Domains automatically catches www and no subdomain, so you should be able to go to http://yourdomainname.yourtld. Check your custom URL after an hour or two! If the site isn’t available by the next day, though, there may be a problem in your GCS bucket or your setup.

Good luck! And remember to check out the “I want to get off Squarespace” project that motivated these posts… http://nicoleradziwill.com