Use your own domain to serve the RudderStack JavaScript SDK and send events to the data plane.
8 minute read
This guide covers the steps to use your own domain instead of RudderStack domains for:
Serving the JavaScript SDK
Source configuration response, and
Sending events to the data plane.
Setting up custom domains for these use cases can help you adhere to your Content Security Policy (CSP), reduce the impact of adblockers, and satisfy any compliance-related requirements.
Note that:
You will need access to your domain’s DNS settings as well as your CDN settings.
The examples in this guide use AWS CloudFront. However, the settings should be similar regardless of your CDN.
Domains
The following table lists the three domains that you need to proxy via your own CDN to successfully load the SDK and route the events to the data plane.
To fetch the source configuration based on the source write key.
DATA_PLANE_URL
To send events to RudderStack. See Glossary for more information on obtaining your data plane URL.
To use your own domain for these endpoints, you will need to route the traffic through your CDN for which you will incur charges.
For each endpoint, you will need to create a CDN distribution and add a CNAME record in your domain for the distribution domain. This guide shows you how to do that.
Setup overview
Start by creating a new distribution. To do so, follow these steps:
Click Services and go to Network & Content Delivery > CloudFront.
Click Create a CloudFront distribution.
The following table gives a high-level overview of the required cache policy, origin request policy, and response headers policy. For detailed distribution settings, click the specific scenario.
Make sure to replace <YOUR_CUSTOM_DOMAIN> in the above snippets with the appropriate values.
NPM
Since you have used the NPM module for integrating the SDK directly into your application, there is no configuration required for serving the core SDK.
Additional configuration
Irrespective of your SDK installation method, you will need some additional configuration for loading the device mode destinations and plugins:
Configure the load API option for plugins as follows if you are not using the @rudderstack/analytics-js/bundled package that bundles all the plugins into the SDK package.
When the JavaScript SDK is loaded, it uses the source write key to fetch the required source configuration from RudderStack.
The SDK makes a GET request to the https://api.rudderstack.com/sourceConfig URL to fetch the source configuration. It uses the source write key as the authorization header.
For this reason, the distribution settings in this scenario will be slightly different as you need to explicitly allowlist the Authorization header to make sure it is sent along with each request.
Step 1: Configure distribution
The following sections highlight the required distribution settings.
Origin
Field
Setting
Origin domain
api.rudderstack.com
Protocol
HTTPS Only
HTTPS port
443
Minimum origin SSL protocol
TLSv1.2
Name
api.rudderstack.com
Enable Origin Shield
No
Default cache behavior settings
Field
Setting
Compress objects automatically
Yes
Viewer protocol policy
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Allowed HTTP methods
GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE
Restrict viewer access
No
Cache key and origin requests
Select Cache policy and origin request policy (recommended) and configure the following settings:
Normally, all tracked events are sent to RudderStack via your data plane URL. To have events routed through your own domain, you need to set up a proxy to that and then use it as the data plane URL while initializing the SDK.
Step 1: Configure distribution
The following sections highlight the required distribution settings.
Origin
Field
Setting
Origin domain
DATA_PLANE_URL
Protocol
HTTPS Only
HTTPS port
443
Minimum origin SSL protocol
TLSv1.2
Name
<YOUR_ORIGIN_NAME>
Enable Origin Shield
No
Default cache behavior settings
Field
Setting
Compress objects automatically
Yes
Viewer protocol policy
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Allowed HTTP methods
GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE
Restrict viewer access
No
Cache key and origin requests
Select Cache policy and origin request policy (recommended) and configure the following settings:
Make sure that the events are routed through your own domain and not the rudderstack.com domain in the network tab of your browser console. See JavaScript SDK FAQ for more information.
Use custom SSL certificates
To use your own domain, you can request or import an SSL certificate with your CDN provider. Note that this is an optional setting.
To use the AWS Certificate Manager with CloudFront, choose the relevant ACM/IAM certificate in the Custom SSL certificate field:
You can choose your subdomain or use a wildcard domain *.yourdomain.com to set up multiple subdomains.
The AWS Certificate Manager will guide you through the verification by email or DNS TXT records. You will be able to choose your own domain for SSL certificates once verified.
FAQ
Can I overcome ad blockers by serving the JavaScript SDK on my domain?
Many popular ad blockers block specific SDK-related downloads and API calls based on the domain name and URL. You can serve the SDK on your CDN to circumvent this issue.
I am using GCP External HTTP(S) Load Balancer to set up my custom domain. Why are any requests from xyz.mydomain.com to cdn.rudderlabs.com resulting in a 403?
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