DNS records

You have two choices for where your domain’s DNS lives. You can keep DNS external at your current provider and just point a couple of records at managed.dev, or you can delegate the zone to managed.dev and manage records from the dashboard. Both work for serving a site. One capability — per-node wildcard certificates for branch environments — needs managed.dev to control the zone, which is the main reason to delegate.

Keep DNS external

If you’re happy with your existing DNS provider, leave the zone there. To go live you only need the records custom domains shows you:

• a CNAME for each subdomain (www, shop, …) pointing at the target managed.dev gives you, and
• an A / AAAA record for the apex, or your provider’s ALIAS/flattening record.

That’s enough to serve traffic and get automatic TLS on those exact hostnames. You manage everything else — MX, SPF, DKIM, verification TXT records — wherever you do today.

Delegate DNS to managed.dev

Delegating means changing your domain’s nameservers at your registrar to the ones managed.dev assigns to the zone. Once the zone is live here, you manage records from the DNS tab and we keep them in sync with your sites.

The DNS tab for a delegated zone in the app.managed.dev dashboard: a table of records grouped by type (A, CNAME, MX, TXT) with name, value, and TTL columns, and an “Add record” button.

Supported record types:

Type	Use it for
A	Point a hostname at an IPv4 address (apex → site target).
AAAA	Point a hostname at an IPv6 address.
CNAME	Alias a subdomain to another hostname (www → site target).
MX	Route mail for the domain to your mail provider.
TXT	Verification, SPF, DKIM, and similar text records.

Note

Records that point a hostname at your site (the apex A/AAAA and the www CNAME) are managed for you when you attach a domain — you don’t hand-edit them. Add records here for mail and third-party services you run yourself.

Manage records

Create, edit, and delete records from the dashboard, or over the API:

cURL

Create an MX record

curl https://api.managed.dev/v1/domains/dom_01J7.../dns \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mfk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "MX",
    "name": "@",
    "value": "mail.example.com",
    "priority": 10,
    "ttl": 3600
  }'

mf CLI

Create an MX record

mf dns create \
  --domain dom_01J7... \
  --type MX --name @ --value mail.example.com \
  --priority 10 --ttl 3600

Managing DNS over the API needs the domains:write scope. See the domains resource reference for the full record schema and the rest of the endpoints.

Developer preview

The public /v1 API and the mf CLI shown here are in active developer preview. The dashboard DNS editor is the supported surface today.

When to use managed.dev DNS

Use managed DNS when you want the records that serve your site managed automatically, and when you want wildcard certificates for branch environments. Per-node wildcard certs are issued via the DNS-01 challenge, which requires managed.dev to write a temporary TXT record into the zone — so the zone has to be ours to control. With external DNS, production and any explicitly-attached hostnames still get certificates fine; it’s the automatic, ever-changing preview hostnames that benefit from a wildcard. See TLS certificates for how that works.

Tip

You can move to managed DNS at any time. Recreate your existing records in the DNS tab first, confirm they match, then switch the nameservers at your registrar. Because the records already exist here, the nameserver change doesn’t interrupt resolution.

Next steps

Custom domainsAttach a hostname to a site, verify it, and set the primary domain.

TLS certificatesAutomatic HTTPS and per-node wildcard certs via DNS-01.

Domains APIManage domains, DNS records, and certificates programmatically.