I understand that to use page rules for URL redirect an A record with orange cloud needs to be set up in DNS.
I see people suggesting various IP for the A record and basically saying it can be anything because the orange cloud server will intercept the http requests.
Couldn’t or Shouldn’t there just be some specific setting rather than choosing an arbitrary IP address?
If using orange cloud, why require an IP address that isn’t used?
And, yes, I know it works it just seems unnecessarily confusing and arbitrary. Am I missing something?
People use redirects for a variety of reasons. I might create a page rule to redirect www.example.com/blog* to blog.example.com. The rest of my site would be served off of www which needs a valid A record pointing to it’s origin.
In a scenario where you are redirectingexample.com to another host the origin doesn’t really matter because no traffic is ever intended to go to it. So you can create an A record which points to 192.0.2.1 (an IP reserved for documentation, but which is considered valid on Cloudflare).
If/when we add a redirect only type record in DNS (which doesn’t actually exist, but why not add it?) then the step of defining the host so an external user can resolve it would be ‘hidden’ behind the creation of the forwarding record. But for the moment we don’t have that type of feature and page rules are the mechanism to implement that as well as path specific forwarding.
Gotcha. Thanks, I will change the seemingly arbitrary 8.8.8.8 currently using to 192.0.2.1, which seems wiser to me, especially after a bit of research and finding these:
