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Oliver Beckstein edited this page Jun 11, 2020 · 31 revisions

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 https://www.mdanalysis.org and https://mdanalysis.org. We use CloudFlare to secure the website and to improve performance (@orbeckst registered the account).

Security on CloudFlare

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).

There are other implications due to using CloudFlare: CloudFlare acts as reverse proxy and all traffic to our sites is routed through their network (which likely screws up analytics unless one restores original visitor IPs). It provides caching and even static cache pages when the downstream resources are not accessible. It also provides some firewalling and protection against DDoS attacks (although this is not really our concern because we do not host any of our servers ourselves).

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.

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

subdomain url target target url real host
blog http://blog.mdanalysis.org blog http://www.mdanalysis.org/blog GitHub (deleted)
docs https://docs.mdanalysis.org release docs https://www.mdanalysis.org/docs/ GitHub (CloudFlare PageRule)
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 (deleted)
help https://help.mdanalysis.org user discussion mailing list https://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion Google
users http://users.mdanalysis.org user discussion mailing list https://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion Google
discussion http://discussion.mdanalysis.org user discussion mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/mdnalysis-discussion Google
workshop https://workshop.mdanalysis.org Workshop/Hackathon 2018 https://www.mdanalysis.org/WorkshopHackathon2018/ GitHub (CloudFlare page rule)
www https://www.mdanalysis.org home page https://mdanalysis.github.io GitHub (CloudFlare page rule) 
| https://mdanalysis.org | home page | `https://mdanalysis.github.io` | GitHub (CloudFlare page rule)

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

Clone this wiki locally