til / redirect www to non-www in Cloudflare

While setting up a new domain in Cloudflare I found that I wasn’t handling www for the domains of this site. What I wanted was to redirect any requests to www to non-www, but it turned out to be harder than I expected. Mostly because I’m not great at DNS setups and I had a hard time finding any tutorials to help me.

I finally got it working by creating an A-record and a page rule.

Create a DNS record #

If you don’t have an A-record, I didn’t, then create a dummy A-record in your domain’s DNS. Set its name to www and the IPv4 address to 192.0.2.1. Make sure that it’s proxied (the orange cloud). The page rule we are going to create will run before this record is resolved so the value shouldn’t matter, but the page rule won’t run if we don’t have this record.

Why 192.0.2.1? It is an IP address that is often used for router setups on local networks, documentation or example code. The address doesn’t go anywhere.

Page rule #

1. Go to page rules (Rules > Page Rules)
2. Create a new rule. Set the first field, “if the URL matches”, to www.mydomain.com/*. The asterisk will help us match any routes in the destination URL.
3. Select “Forwarding URL” and “301 - Permanent Redirect”
4. Set the destination URL to https://mydomain.com/$1

The asterisk combined with the $1 will match and keep any routes. For example, www.mydomain.com/sub/path will redirect to mydomain.com/sub/path. If we don’t include this part we would be redirected to the root, i.e. www.mydomain.com/sub/path would redirect to mydomain.com.