Friday, June 6, 2014

Google App engine application with godaddy domain mapping issue

Recently, I had an issue with mapping a domain to the Google App engine application that I had built. 
I bought a domain - cinemahunter.com and setup forwarding on godaddy to redirect from http://cinemahunter.com to http://www.cinemahunter.com
In Google App Engine, I clicked on settings, and then Add Domain. It asked me for Google Apps, gave my domain name, it asked me to login to godaddy.com, I logged in successfully with the credentials and it was good. At this point, there are 2 steps outlined.
  1. Change how your naked domain (cinemahunter.com) is redirected. I have www in the textbox between http:// and .cinemahunter.com. It also said - You must change the A-record at your domain host for this change to take effect. I am assuming this is the forwarding that I setup in Godaddy. I clicked on continue
  2. Now it said to create a A record in DNS management page. I went to Godaddy and under A (host) I deleted the entry with IP - 50.63.202.22 and created 4 records with the following as specified in Google apps for Host @ points to 216.239.32.21, 216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21, 216.239.38.21
I saved the changes twice in Godaddy. Also, I verified that under CName(Alias) www points to @.
At this point, I clicked on I completed the steps on Google Apps website. But when I try to access my website by typing www.cinemahunter.com or http://cinemahunter.com, I get the following error.
Google
  1. That’s an error.
The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
After hours of going round and round with several links from google searches, I figured out that most of the documentation was outdated for the domain mapping.
So for anyone else, having this issue, here is the resolution.
Google Apps is no longer free. You have to pay about $60 a year for the service. For Google App engine users, google started giving $50 upto maximum of 3 because of this issue. They stopped it after having a fix for directly mapping Google app engine to domain. Now you no longer need Google Apps and what you need to do is to go to https://console.developers.google.com and select your application. On the left hand side, click under App Engine --> settings. This will give you three steps
  1. If you haven't already, verify that you own the domain. It will then be added to the list in step 2. --> Give your domain name here and verify. Now it will take you to godaddy login page and you sign in with your credentials.
  2. Select the domain you want to point to. This will show nodomain even after domain is verified in step 1 below. This confused me. But I logged out and logged in and I saw the domain cinemahunter.com in the dropdown. There are two options here either the main domain or the sub-domain with www. I chose the sub-domain since I had forwarding setup in godaddy.
  3. Go to godaddy and under CName, under www change points to ghs.googlehosted.com.
Thats it!! It worked like a charm within a minute. Google makes it so difficult with all these changes. All the search results for mapping GAE to godaddy were old instructions which led to nowhere and the info on these changes were to be found only after digging deeply. Hopefully this will help someone without wasting some 8 hours like for me. Good luck !!

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