Automating my personal DNS setup, part 1

This is a quick first pass at a very overdue effort.

In August 2009, I accepted my first post-college job working at a Web hosting company that also operated as a domain name registrar. I worked nights and found myself using whois to find fun domains. I began collecting domain names as so many of my friends and peers have.

Fast forward many moons and I have retained a fairly reasonable number of domain names. While the number is reasonable, subdomains abound and I would very much like to reap the benefits of Infrastructure as code (IaC) to make managing these domains a bit easier.

For the first pass at this effort, I chose four domains across two DNS providers.

🔧 Tools

• DNS providers

  • Cloudflare
  • Google Cloud DNS

• GitLab

  • Version control + CI for IaC Scanning

• Infracost

  • The Infracost GitLab CI template is awesome! 💖

• Terraform

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📓 Notes

The project is at: gitlab.com/brie/infra.

This manages the DNS records for:

• carranza.engineer
• sunflower.gallery
• termmarc.com
• unicorns.run

I use the standard Terraform workflow:

• vim foo.tf
• terraform plan -out tf.plan
• terraform apply

I set up Infracost to get automated cost summaries like this (not super interesting) one in merge requests.

✨ Wish List

For parts 2 and beyond.

• Provide credentials as masked and protected secrets to permit updates to infrastructure to run in GitLab CI
• Manage records in AWS Route 53
• Explore awesome-terraform: incorporate useful and interesting tools.
• Monitoring: I trust terraform plan and everything but still…

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About the photo: MEOW WOLF | I very highly recommend a visit to Omega Mart at Meow Wolf Las Vegas.

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