Subdomain-only zone
Hey. I’m looking at the documentation but have struggled to find much of a clear answer, so would appreciate a response from someone quite knowledgable in this area.
In the scenario where a domain’s authoritative name servers are not pointing to Cloudflare (say, example.com), is there a way to setup a subdomain (blog.example.com) that is proxied through Cloudflare and enjoys the same CDN and worker functionality? And what are the limitations here if this is possible?
For context, the use case for this is that we are working with third-party partners who do not currently use Cloudflare at all on their domain, but we’d like to use Cloudflare to manage one of their subdomains (specifically, caching and workers). Thanks!
5 Replies
You're looking for Partial Setups, you can either do a partial cname setup (Biz or higher):
https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-setup/
Or a subdomain setup where you delegate the subdomain via nameserver records to Cloudflare (Enterpise only):
https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/subdomain-setup/
Restrictions wise, besides the plan requirements, the only one I can really think of mentioning is that you can't do a partial cname setup if the root domain is on Cloudflare DNS in anyway (either CF direct, or through a partner like Porkbun, it just won't resolve due to conflicts)
Would partial CNAME setups still allow us to use things like page rules and workers on specific routes? What about the WAF?
All the same features, other then things that require DNS (DNSSEC, etc)
chat.openai.com is an example of one you probably used, just a simple cname, nothing too complex
Thanks. I get that DNSSEC etc won’t be available, but I imagine we could still have a simple A record for the partially CNAME’d subdomain on the Cloudflare side, and it would resolve correctly?
yup, https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-setup/setup/, you'd just create an A/AAAA/CNAME