Route 53

Route 53 is a really powerful dns service offered by AWS. In this section, we're going to buy a domain name and set it up a hosted zone in Route 53 so that we can use a custom domain name with any resouces we setup in the future.

You can buy a domain name from wherever you want, but I personally use Namecheap, so all my examples will be using a Namecheap domain.

Production Hosted Zone

step 1:

Login to the Production account

step 2:

Navigate to the Route 53 console

step 3:

Click on Get started

step 4:

Create a new hosted zone

step 5:

Search for a new domain name and buy it. Use any service you like. Namecheap is fine.

step 6:

Input your new domain name into the hosted zone and create the hosted zone

This is your new hosted zone. You'll need the NS values for the next step.

step 7:

Back in namecheap, or wherever you purchased your domain, navigate to the nameserver settings and add the custom AWS name servers.

Once you save these name servers, your hosted zone is all setup. You are now able to start using your new domain name however you like.

But currently this domain can only be used from the production account. When we're developing apps, it's nice to be able to use dev.domain.com or other subdomains when testing things out.

Playground hosted zone

step 8:

Login to the Playground account

step 9:

Navigate to Route 53 and create a hosted zone in the Playground account

step 10:

use "play.your.domain" as the hosted zone name. Replace "your.domain" with your actual domain name.

step 11:

Copy the nameserver values

step 12:

Head back over to the production account

step 13:

Click on Route 53

step 14:

Select your hosted zone

step 15:

Click on Create record

step 16:

Type "play"

step 17:

Select NS – Name servers for a hosted zone

step 18:

Paste in the name server values from the play account, and click Create records

Your production hosted zone should look something like this

Now you can use your.domain from the production account and play.your.domain from the playground account.

You could do the same for the development account, but we won't need that for now.