I'm back, and with a new domain!

It’s been a while (over 5 years to be “exact”) since my last post! Recently, my ruialves.me domain expired, which left my personal page, my chess games page and this very blog without a home.

It was time for a new one, and given I didn’t particularly like the .me domain extension and that it was quite expensive, I decided to buy ruialves.net instead.

While I was at it, I decided to finally get a proper email address on my own domain and to manage the whole thing as code.

A shiny new email

I wanted rui@ruialves.net to work as an alias of my personal Gmail account – that is, receiving and sending emails with the new address, without having to manage yet another inbox.

After browsing for a bit, I decided to try a completely free approach that turned out to be pretty neat:

Receiving is handled by CloudFlare Email Routing, which forwards everything sent to rui@ruialves.net to my Gmail inbox;
Sending is handled by Gmail itself, using the “Send mail as” feature with Gmail’s own SMTP server.

Since my emails now leave through Google’s servers, I also had to update the SPF DNS record to authorize both providers, which was something along the lines of:

v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net include:_spf.google.com ~all

And vois là, I finally have a nifty email (one without the name of my high school in it 🤦) I can use in my day-to-day – That wasn’t so hard!

Moving the websites

All my websites are hosted on Netlify, so moving them was mostly a matter of updating the DNS records to point to the new domain.

There were a couple of bumps on the road in generating the SSL/TLS certificates with Let’s Encrypt through Netlify to get HTTPS going, but it eventually “magically” went through by clicking the “Retry” button enough times.

Finally, I also took the opportunity to redesign all the websites I own (this time using “a bit” of AI help to get the pages elegant-looking and SEO working properly, as I’m terrible at all-things-frontend), and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

Infrastructure as Code

I like to configure stuff as code, both at work and in life. Thus, might as well use OpenTofu and the CloudFlare provider to configure all my email and DNS, and put it in a GitHub repository!

The setup is fairly simple and has two modules: one for the zone’s DNS records and one for Email Routing. Since most of it had already been created through the dashboard, I brought the existing resources into the state using import blocks.

All values live in a single values.tf file, so adding a new subdomain is a matter of adding a few lines and running tofu apply, which is exactly how I added the chess subdomain (which I only remembered existed at the end of this process):

chess = {
  name    = "chess.ruialves.net"
  type    = "CNAME"
  content = "rui-chess-games.netlify.app"
  ttl     = 1
  proxied = false
}

While I was at it, I also added a couple of extra things:

CAA records, which restrict which certificate authorities can issue certificates for the domain;
DNSSEC, which protects my DNS – I honestly only activated this to get rid of a warning in the CloudFlare dashboard + it is pretty much a one-liner.

Regarding the state, I’m keeping it simple with a local backend, and tracking the state file with git.

All in all, it only took me a couple of hours to get everything up and running, and I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. I haven’t been very motivated to do computer-stuff outside work, but found this refreshing for a change!

Now let’s see if I don’t take another 5 years to post something here!