Many efforts were involved in the Internet community to make domain names available in many languages other than those based on the Latin script. And now, with the help of IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) technology, almost any Unicode character, whose number is considerably larger than the traditionally used ASCII ones, can be added to the domain name. This is made possible by the implicit conversion of such characters into the standard view, using Punycode.
The platform supports such intentions and allows users from all over the world to use their native language (i.e., a variety of symbols beyond the previously available Latin characters, such as Cyrillic letters or Chinese hieroglyphs) when setting environment names and aliases. Such names will be correctly displayed throughout the dashboard and while accessing an account via the SSH console. In addition, you can easily bind the external IDN to your environment using the same workflow as for standard custom domain names.
One more specific domain name category is gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domains) – a subtype of TLDs, maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and originally intended for use by particular types of organizations and companies. Here, “generic” refers to the fact that such names are not tied to any specific country and theoretically can be used by anyone on the Internet anywhere in the world. gTLD integration to the platform provides users with the possibility to bind such domain names (visible to Internet users as the suffix at the end of an address, like .org, .academy, .best, etc.) to their environments.
So let’s discover how to operate with such specific domain names within the platform.
Default Environment IDN Domain
1. Firstly, you can gain the advantage of IDN usage while setting the name of your environment via the topology wizard.
Preconfigure your environment settings and enter the desired appellation in any language into the Environment name field below (the only limitation: it must be at least 5 characters long), then click Create.
Here are a few more examples:
2. The process of such environments’ creation is performed in a usual way, so in a minute, your new environment will be added to the dashboard.
3. If you open in a browser your environment, which uses IDN, the URL would be similar to the one you can see in the image below:
This is how the domain name of our example environment is shown in a Punycode (a way to represent Unicode with the limited character subset of the ASCII standard).
To avoid such an awkward link view, you can bind a custom domain name to your environment (including the IDN one).
4. Also, you can set an alias for your environment (or for the separate nodes within it) in your native language, in order to make your work easier and even more familiar.
Custom IDN/gTLD Domain Name
Both internationalized and generic top-level domain names can be easily bounded to your environment in just the same manner as it is done for other custom domains. The appropriate workflow, described in our documentation, is fairly simple, so just follow it to attach one or even several domains to your app.
The Swapping Domains feature can also be used for operating with these specific domain types:
