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Last updated: 7 Mar 2024

Domain Name System (DNS) records

For Technical 2nd Line documentation on when and how to respond to DNS delegation and domain verification requests, read the DNS change request and hostmaster Google doc.

GOV.UK is responsible for managing several DNS zones, spanning a number of *.gov.uk domains. As of February 2024, there are 45 hosted zones, configuring many hundreds of domains. A list of hosted zones is retrievable from a terminal using:

gds aws govuk-production-poweruser -- aws route53 list-hosted-zones | grep Name

Records for GOV.UK systems

We use a few domains:

  • alphagov.co.uk is the old domain name GOV.UK publishing used to live on. We maintain records which point to Bouncer so that these URLs redirect.
  • publishing.service.gov.uk and govuk.service.gov.uk are where GOV.UK lives.

DNS for *.service.gov.uk domains

GOV.UK Technical 2nd Line are responsible for delegating DNS to other government services. Note that we do not manage any other DNS records: if you get a request concerning anything other than NS records, it should be rejected.

When you’ve verified the authenticity of the request as per the SRE docs above, you should:

  1. Ensure you have Terraform Cloud access
  2. Commit your changes in govuk-dns-tf (see example)
  3. Push your changes to GitHub and open a pull request
  4. Terraform Cloud will automatically perform a plan. Open the govuk-dns-tf workspace to see it.
  5. If you are happy with the results of the plan, merge your PR
  6. From the govuk-dns-tf landing page, click on the green pre-merge check tick and open the “details” link from the Terraform Cloud check.
  7. Press “Confirm and apply” in Terraform Cloud.

DNS for govuk.digital and govuk-internal.digital

Currently these zones are only used in environments running on AWS.

These DNS zones are hosted in Route53 and managed by Terraform. Changes can be made in the govuk-aws and govuk-aws-data repositories. Ask the Platform teams if you need help making your changes.

DNS for the publishing.service.gov.uk domain

To make a change to this zone, begin by adding the records to the yaml file for the zone held in the DNS config repo.

The deployment process is the same as for service.gov.uk

DNS for the gov.uk top level domain

Jisc is a non-profit which provides networking to UK education and government. They host DNS for the gov.uk. zone.

Requests to modify the DNS records for gov.uk. should be sent by email to naming@ja.net from someone on Jisc’s approved contacts list. Speak to a member of Senior Tech or someone in the Platform teams if you need to make a change and don’t have access.

You should also make sure that the following groups of people are aware before requesting any changes:

  • Technical 2nd Line (via email)
  • GOV.UK’s Head of Tech and the senior tech team
  • The CDDO domains team (#team-domains)

Technical 2nd Line should be notified of any planned changes via email.

  • The domain name gov.uk. is an apex domain so it cannot have a CNAME record. Instead, it has A records that point directly to anycast virtual IP addresses (VIPs) for our CDN provider.
  • www.gov.uk. is a CNAME to www-cdn.production.govuk.service.gov.uk., which means we do not need to make a request to Jisc if we want to change CDN providers. We can just change where the CNAME points to.

DNS for non-gov.uk domains

GOV.UK also manages DNS zones for some non-gov.uk domains (e.g. independent-inquiry.uk).

These should be managed in Terraform, with each domain having its own zone configuration file in govuk-dns-tf.

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