Path redirects not working with proxied subdomain

General Rules
1

What is the name of the domain?

docs

What is the issue you’re encountering

Path redirects not working with proxied subdomain

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I have a subdomain “docs” which is setup with CNAME to route to an external host. Cloudflare proxy is enabled. This has been working for years.

On the docs subdomain, I have a webpage. This webpage needs to be moved to the top level domain so I need a redirect for continuity. Simple, right?

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to setup a redirect rule or page rule to successfully do this, and nothing has worked. The rule is the first to run. I have configured rules in the past without issue. I have read as many related posts on community as I can find, used AI for help, and tried hundreds of varying tweaks trying to get this to work. I’ve even left it for a few hours in case there was some DNS propagation issue, but other tests for this were near instant so I don’t think it is that.

curl -I always returns HTTP 200 which shows the Cloudflare proxy/redirect rule is not working.

What am I missing? Is it just that you can’t redirect a page from a subdomain to a top domain?

TIA

P.S. I can’t setup redirects on the external host of the subdomain.

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

  1. Setup a DNS subdomain (CNAME) with cloudflare proxy enabled.
  2. Add a webpage to the subdomain and the top domain.
  3. Setup a redirect rule to send the subdomain page to the top domain page.
2

Who is the host and what is the DNS record? Can you show a screenshot of your Redirect Rule?

3

I don’t have proof for this but after looking into it some more I believe the issue is due to CNAME flattening and because the third-party host (GitBook) is also using Cloudflare. I also think that previous redirects I thought I was doing were actually just Gitbook automatic redirects (although I can’t be sure). I don’t have an alternative solution yet otherwise I would share.

There is a bit more context here for what GitBook is doing here: GitBook bypassing Cloudflare DNS to route traffic to their domain | Hacker News

FWIW: I was a relatively early adopter of Gitbook and recommended them to many people over the years. However, that’s all been destroyed in a matter of days. They’ve just forced a price increase on us which 10x’s our bill so we are leaving. I contacted them and they just said to consolidate our spaces. OK… I’ll consolidate them somewhere else. Feels like they are gearing up to sell which is fine I suppose, but it’s priced out of being a scalable dev friendly tool now.