To set up Cloudflare for SaaS for apex proxying - as opposed to the normal setup - perform the following steps.
Before you start creating custom hostnames:
- Add your zone to Cloudflare (this should be within the account associated with your IP prefixes).
- Enable Cloudflare for SaaS for your zone.
- Review the Hostname prioritization guidelines. Wildcard custom hostnames behave differently than an exact hostname match.
- (optional) Review the following documentation:
- API documentation (if you have not worked with the Cloudflare API before).
- Certificate validation.
When you first enable Cloudflare for SaaS, you need to perform a few steps prior to creating any custom hostnames.
With apex proxying, you can either bring your own IP range or use a set of IP addresses provided by Cloudflare.
For more details on this step, reach out to your account team.
The fallback origin is where Cloudflare will route traffic sent to your custom hostnames (must be proxied).
To create your fallback origin:
- Create a proxied
A,AAAA, orCNAMErecord pointing to the IP address of your fallback origin (where Cloudflare will send custom hostname traffic).
| Type | Name | IPv4 address | Proxy status |
|---|---|---|---|
A |
proxy-fallback |
192.0.2.1 |
Proxied |
- Designate that record as your fallback origin.
-
In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Custom Hostnames page.
Go to Custom Hostnames ↗ -
For Fallback Origin, enter the hostname for your fallback origin.
-
Select Add Fallback Origin.
Using the hostname of the record you just created, update the fallback origin value.
- Once you have added the fallback origin, confirm that its status is Active.
You need to perform the following steps for each custom hostname.
Before you create a hostname, you need to plan for:
- Certificate validation: Upon successful validation, the certificates are deployed to Cloudflare’s global network.
- Hostname validation: Upon successful validation, Cloudflare proxies traffic for this hostname.
You must complete both these steps for the hostname to work as expected.
After planning for certification and hostname validation, you can create the custom hostname.
To create a custom hostname:
-
In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Custom Hostnames page.
Go to Custom Hostnames ↗ -
Select Add Custom Hostname.
-
Add your customer's hostname
app.customer.comand set the relevant options, including:- Select the minimum TLS version.
- Select the validation method.
- Define a custom origin server.
- Enterprise customers can also select the certificate authority (CA), upload a custom certificate, or enable wildcard, which adds a
*.<custom-hostname>SAN to the custom hostname certificate. For more details, refer to Hostname priority and Plans.
-
Select Add Custom Hostname.
-
To create a custom hostname using the API, use the Create Custom Hostname endpoint.
- Only Enterprise customers can use the
certificate_authorityparameter to specify a CA, thecustom_certificate/custom_cert_bundleto upload a custom certificate, orwildcardto create a wildcard certificate. Refer to Plans. - You can leave the
certificate_authorityparameter empty to set it to "default CA". With this option, Cloudflare checks the CAA records before requesting the certificates, which helps ensure the certificates can be issued from the CA.
- Only Enterprise customers can use the
-
For the newly created custom hostname, the
POSTresponse may not return the DCV validation tokenvalidation_records. It is recommended to make a secondGETcommand (with a delay) to retrieve these details.
The response contains the complete definition of the new custom hostname.
To finish the custom hostname setup, your customer can set up either an A or CNAME record at their authoritative DNS provider.
If your customer uses an A record at their authoritative DNS provider, they need to point their hostname to the IP prefix allocated for your account. You should also make sure that they point to the specific IPs that you want to use for apex proxying - if you have Static IPs or BYOIP, and your customer points to any of the IPs associated to your account, validation will run.
Your customer's A record might look like the following:
example.com. 60 IN A 192.0.2.1If your customer uses a CNAME record at their authoritative DNS, they need to point their hostname to your CNAME target 1.
Your customer's CNAME record might look like the following:
mystore.com CNAME customers.saasprovider.comIf your customer is also using Cloudflare for their domain, they should keep their DNS record pointing to your SaaS provider in place for as long as they want to use your service.
For more details, refer to Remove custom hostnames.
If you have regional services set up for your custom hostnames, Cloudflare always uses the processing region associated with your DNS target record (instead of the processing region of any custom origins).
↩