Cloud Platform

Domains

In this guide we will show you how to deploy an app on Unikraft Cloud (UKC) and link it to a domain name you own (e.g., mydomain.com).

Configuring your External DNS Provider

Before we can launch an app, you need to ensure that you have configured things correctly with your DNS provider. There are two cases here:

For a subdomain you own such as docs.mydomain.com, a CNAME is enough. In this case, you can just add a CNAME record with your sub-domain (docs) as the host and point the record to UKC's metro e.g., fra0.kraft.host.
For an apex domain (e.g., mydomain.com), add an ALIAS, ANAME, or flattened CNAME record. Depending on your provider, leave the host field empty or enter @. Point the record to UKC's metro e.g., fra0.kraft.host. If your DNS provider does not support ALIAS, ANAME, or flattened CNAME records, add an A record and point the record to the IP address of UKC's metro

You can find information about the UKC metros available to you, as well as their IP addresses, via the cmd kraft cloud metro ls.

You can have multiple domains for the same service. In addition, UKC supports wildcarded domains. Please refer to the certificates API) for more info.

Launching your App

Let's assume we want to use NGINX as our app:


 
git clone https://github.com/unikraft-cloud/examples
cd examples/nginx

Make sure to log into Unikraft Cloud by setting your token and a metro close to you. We use fra0 (Frankfurt, 🇩🇪) in this guide:


 
# Set Unikraft Cloud access token
export UKC_TOKEN=token
# Set metro to Frankfurt, DE
export UKC_METRO=fra0

With this in place, we'll use the kraft cloud deploy command to create an instance of the web server and to link it to a custom name; the latter is done through the -d flag:


 
kraft cloud deploy -p 443:8080 -d mydomain.com .

The resulting output of the deploy command should be similar to:


 
[●] Deployed successfully!
 │
 ├────────── name: nginx-67zbu
 ├────────── uuid: 269019de-f7dc-4077-9568-012ad594ca87
 ├───────── state: running
 ├─────────── url: https://mydomain.com
 ├───────── image: nginx@sha256:6abb4f2ba4501068a84885d7b8b127adaf3d83c25fd43e79d5a142f6d8703c93
 ├───── boot time: 11.13ms
 ├──────── memory: 1024 MiB
 ├─────── service: wispy-moon-dpg6d54i
 ├── private fqdn: nginx-67zbu.internal
 ├──── private ip: 172.16.6.5
 └────────── args: /usr/bin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

In case you're curious, when issuing the -d flag Unikraft Cloud will request a new certificate from Let's Encrypt.

It can take a few seconds before the certificate is issued. If there are misconfigurations or DNS changes that your external DNS provider has not propagated yet, this can take much longer. You can check the validation status of the certificate with kraft cloud cert get (more on this command below). Also note that the UKC controller will retry the operation at these intervals: [1,5,10,30] minutes, and then [1,6,12,24] hours (and then fail).

You're all set! You can test your deployment with curl:

Code
 
curl https://mydomain.com

Last modified on September 9, 2025

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