Custom domains now available on preview environments

You’re probably all very familiar with the URLs we currently generate automatically for your environments on Platform.sh by now. And while they are very useful, they’re not the most friendly-looking as, we build them using the following pattern:    

<environment-name>-<hash>-<project-id>.<region>.platformsh.site

This approach is important because it ensures that our URLs are unique for all projects and their environments but it also makes them pretty long, overly complicated, and let’s face it—not the prettiest. But this is the case no more!

Custom domains have arrived 

With our PaaS, you were always able to set up a custom domain for your production environment, but it was not possible for your staging or development environments (also called preview environments), meaning you were stuck with our auto-generated URLs.

Which led to many of you letting us know that we should do something about it, by voting for the feature on our Product Portal. It soon became the most-voted feature on the Product Portal so we knew it was time to listen and do something to improve this!

And that’s exactly what we did with the release of our new feature; custom domains on preview environments!

What does this feature mean exactly?

In a nutshell, with this new feature, you will be able to use your own domain for your preview environments. For example, use https://staging.mysite.com, instead of the default long URL auto-generated by Platform.sh which would be something like https://staging-<hash>-<project-id>.<region>.platformsh.site. This way, you can have nice, clean URLs to share with internal stakeholders, external clients, or anyone who needs access to your preview environments.

With your own domain, your staging and development URLs will look far more professional, and also help strengthen your brand identity. Not to mention the added bonus of removing the problems caused by our auto-generated URLs when testing third-party services on preview environments. 

Nice! How can I use custom domains on my preview environments?

This feature is available as of now at no extra cost for all of our Enterprise and Elite customers. 

In fact, some of you might’ve been already enjoying the feature as beta testers. Many thanks to all of you who helped us test out the feature in the wild, and provided us with valuable feedback ahead of this official release.

Some other important things to mention:

• The feature is only available on your Grid or Dedicated Gen 3 projects.       
  Dedicated Gen 2 projects are not supported, but it is already possible to add a custom domain on the dedicated staging environment of your Dedicated Gen 2 projects.
• There is by default a limit of 5 preview environments where you can add custom domains. This limit is set mainly to prevent abuse and can be increased without charge. Just contact our support team if you wish to add custom domains on more than 5 preview environments and as always, they'll be happy to help.

As with all our features, you can use the Console or the CLI, depending on your preferences, to configure your new staging and development domains. For more details on how to set up a custom domain on your preview environments, please make sure to read our documentation page.

Share your feedback and shape the future of Platform.sh!

We would love to hear your thoughts on our new custom domains feature! 

This feature is the perfect example that voting in our Product Portal can lead to some great improvements! So please keep sharing your feedback and suggestions with us, so we can improve your user experience. You can join the conversation either in our forums, the Platform.sh Community (where you’ll also find guides and tutorials), via email, or through our various social channels including: Twitter, Dev.to, Reddit, and Slack.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the future!