Information also available in the WEM Online Documentation.
At some point you might want to use a hostname that is part of your own domain to be linked to your WEM-portal.
Something like https://portal.yourdomain.ext
That is surely possible, for portals in the EUR-zone:
- Create a CNAME record for this hostname in your domain's DNS management (or let your DNS management people do this for you).
- Point the CNAME to live.wem.io. (the last dot can be optional in some DNS editors... these will remove the last dot and that is OK).
- Add this hostname to your portal settings and publish from Modeler to Staging and Live (publish is a linear chain) WITHOUT forcing https (there is no certificate yet).
- For an SSL Certificate, make a specific request in MyWEM Support (read on for more details). When the SSL certificate is available, you can activate the option Force HTTP and again, publish this change from modeler to staging and live.
You can use the staging environment for a testportal.yourdomain.ext, by using staging.wem.io as targetvalue for the CNAME record.
ONLY use live.wem.io (for live/production) and staging.wem.io (for test/acceptance) as target values for your CNAME records!
These (live/staging .wem.io) are the domains by which the WEM Runtime Servers are known and reached on the internet in our EUR Zone; once the WEM Runtime Server is reached, the WEM Runtime will recognize your actual hostname and the corresponding portal will be loaded and presented to the user.
So, for CNAME records in your domain's DNS management, use:
| Your domain hostnames |
|
CNAME target |
| portal.yourdomain.ext |
|
live.wem.io |
| testing.yourdomain.ext |
|
staging.wem.io |
Wait until the DNS-change is available through nameservers (can take up to 24 hours).
You can check this using Google's DIG: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/
Use HTTPS
The above steps will be enough for portals without SSL (https).
To have SSL available as well, WEM offers the service for free Let's Encrypt certificates.
If you want to have SSL enabled on your portal on your own domain, you need to create a Ticket in MyWEM, requesting a Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate for your specific portal by using the specific button [Request SSL Certificate], specifying the hostname for which the certificate should be made.
We can only create Let's Encrypt SSL certificates for a hostname if the CNAME is pointing to live.wem.io, we check this using Googles DIG online tool. The process following the [Request SSL Certificate] button checks your values automatically for correct CNAME definition.
For Portals in APAC ZONE:
For portals running in the APAC Zone (published to Asia Pacific), the procedure is slightly different, because in that environment we currently need to setup configurations manually for specific hostnames and you can only use the LIVE portal to be hosted on your own custom domain.
- Set up a CNAME record in your domain, to point the portal's live hostname (portalname.yourdomain.ext) to live.wemapac.io ;
- When the CNAME record is available (check using DIG) , you can create a Support Ticket to request a configuration setup for [portalname.yourdomain.ext] and we will create the config and add a LetsEncrypt challenge so you can use it with https.
See image linked below for a hopefully helpful explanatory image of CNAME settings and WEM Portal Settings.
DON'T FORGET to PUBLISH your project changes from Modeler to Staging and Live, to transfer the changed settings to the correct Runtime!
Ralph - WEM Xpert since 2011
"I speak to machines with the voice of humanity"
-- Marillion, Man of a thousand faces --