DigitalOcean and Domains.Google

skew

I've had a DigitalOcean droplet (running Mediawiki) set up for a while now. I finally got around to getting my domain. It was hours of me floundering around before I realized what all I was missing. Some searches has also suggested that, for some reason, Google's name service doesn't play nice with DigitalOcean? So, I wanted to record my suffering so as someone else here might avoid it.

First, Google will ask if you want to create a site or forward the address. You want neither. You need to go to "Configure DNS". You then go to the very bottom, under Custom resource records. Set the following:

@ A 1h Your.Droplet.IP.Address
www CNAME 1h domain.com

Next, make sure you go back onto your server, and updated LocalSettings.php. You want to set $wgServer to the address (with no slash on the end). Ex: www.example.com

When I first did this, I tried to set up forwarding. That's not the same thing. Then I set up Google to point at DigitalOcean's DNS host. That didn't work. Playing with DNS settings can be very frustrating as they can take "a while" to update. So... hopefully this saves someone a lil grief!