Testing Cloudflare configuration before migrating DNS servers

Hi

I finished configuring a quite complicated DNS zone on Cloudflare as it imported automatically only 1/3 of the records there.

I was looking around for a way to actually test if it all works before upgrading the plan (for personalised SSL certs) and migrate, but it seems any method that was working before is now not working anymore.

I can see that the cloudflare DNS hosts respond still with the original IP after a few days, so that suggests to me that they are not updated/operative till the switch happens.

Now this poses the problem of how to test: a DNS change can take hours, so if there’s something not working properly and breaking the website (a quite complex ecommerce one so with some exclusions in place), it might take hours to reverse the DNS back (and very inconvenient to understand what is not working).

How is possible that on a Business Plan there’s no way to test? The CNAME is not useable for that in our case as it would imply changing settings on the website to have it working on that subdomain (while is working on the main domain).

What are the possible solutions?

I was thinking is it a solution to disable all caching (Proxied) to DNS-only in my Cloudflare DNS configuration, then switch the domain DNS to Cloudflare so that it is literally doing only DNS and nothing else? (no caching or SSL certificates etc. nothing apart from DNS)

That way I suppose after the DNS propagation I could enable a single DNS line/subdomain/function to Proxied and test if it creates problems, and if it does instantly disable it while I solve the problem and in the meantime Cloudflare goes back to serving my original content transparently?

Any idea/suggestion? Is any line ‘DNS only’ really completely disabled of any Cloudflare processing?

You need to change your nameservers to the two assigned by cloudflare

+1 yes, do that until the nameservers are confirmed, some great steps to follow here, Deprecated - How to eliminate (or minimise) downtime when adding your domain to Cloudflare.

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