DNS

We have our own domain mdanalysis.org (registered with GoDaddy; @orbeckst is responsible for paying and administrating the domain). We set up a custom domain with GitHub pages so that our website is hosted as GH pages but appears under our domain, specifically as http://www.mdanalysis.org and http://mdanalysis.org.

The nameservers are under Cloudflare's control (since 2017-09-28) so that we get a free SSL certificate and can have website and docs appear under SSL, i.e., https://mdanalysis.org (following the instructions from gsempe Build a fast, secured and free static site in less than 3 hours). DNSSEC was also enabled (by following the Cloudflare instructions for How to add a DS record to GoDaddy).

SSL is not enforced (and in fact, the previously established subdomain forwarding only works unecrypted at the moment).

Repository urls

This has the additional effect that GH pages in repositories under MDAnalysis will also show up under our domain, for instance http://www.mdanalysis.org/mdanalysis/packages/doc/html is the developer documentation. Similarly, any tool that has its own repo (such as RotamerConvolveMD) can also have it's own docs such as http://www.mdanalysis.org/RotamerConvolveMD (one just has to craft the gh-pages branch carefully so that the index.html file appears at the top of the repo).

Subdomains

Since using Cloudflare for DNS, subdomain forwarding is inconsistent: it works for unencrypted URLs but fails for encrypted (SSL) URLs. This is likely because it uses GoDaddy infrastructure that is not set up to accept https requests.

We can use Cloudlflare Pagerules redirecting but on the free plan we only have 3 free rules available.

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As issue #2 points out, we can also do subdomain forwarding to make it easier to get to the various components of the project. The following list is the full list of forwarded domains:

At the moment:

Existing subdomain forwards

NOTE: Only http will forward, SSL-encrypted https will hang (with the exception of https://www.mdanalysis.org)

subdomain	url	target	target url	real host
blog	http://blog.mdanalysis.org	blog	http://www.mdanalysis.org/blog	GitHub
docs	http://docs.mdanalysis.org	release docs	http://mdanalysis.org/docs/	GitHub
wiki	http://wiki.mdanalysis.org	wiki	https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki	GitHub
issues	http://issues.mdanalysis.org	issue tracker	https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/issues	GitHub
source	http://source.mdanalysis.org	GitHub repository	https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis	GitHub
download	http://download.mdanalysis.org	download page	https://pypi.python.org/pypi/MDAnalysis	PyPi
developers	http://developers.mdanalysis.org	developer mailing list	https://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-devel	Google
devdocs	http://devdocs.mdanalysis.org	develop branch docs	http://www.mdanalysis.org/mdanalysis/package/doc/html/	GitHub
help	https://help.mdanalysis.org	user discussion mailing list	https://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion	Google
users	https://users.mdanalysis.org	user discussion mailing list	https://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion	Google
discussion	https://discussion.mdanalysis.org	user discussion mailing list	http://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion	Google
www	https://www.mdanalysis.org	home page	https://mdanalysis.github.io	GitHub

And of course, https://mdanalysis.org and https://www.mdanalysis.org are the MDAnalysis GitHub pages.

Using subdomains

One can link to a wiki page like https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki/Install as http://wiki.mdanalysis.org/Install