Custom Domain for your Planet
Directing your Urbit ship to a custom domain, and a list of known applications on Urbit
Welcome, Crypto Dummies!
If you’re new here, this substack is focused on educating those that know nothing about crypto and blockchain technology. If that’s you, you’re in the right place!
Over the past few weeks here at Crypto4Dummiez, we’ve been focused on helping you get started with hosting your Urbit ship on a Virtual Private Server. We’ll pick up where we left off and show you how you can tie your custom domain to your Urbit ship and explore a plethora of applications available on the Urbit network.
If you’re still feeling a little lost check out some of our previous posts to catch up:
Let’s get started!
Custom Domains for your Urbit Planet
Last week we went over how to get S3 (Simple Storage Service) configured with our Urbit ship, and how to obtain a free subdomain through the Tlon Network.
Attaching a custom domain or acquiring a subdomain, can make accessing your Planet from a mobile browser or web browser, quick and easy.
If you were wondering how you can direct your Planet to a custom domain we’ll show you how today!
Step 1: Obtain/Provide your domain
If you don’t already own a unique domain name that you would like to use, you will need to purchase one. Standard domains can range anywhere from $5-$15 a month.
PS If you’re looking to buy one we would recommend google domains.
If you already own a domain or have recently registered it, directing your Urbit ship to your custom domain is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
This guide will focus on domains acquired from google domains to make this process as easy as possible.
Navigate to your homepage on Google Domains and search for the DNS tab.
Click on the Custom name servers tab.
Here we will need to configure our domain to point to our VPS name servers, to do so we will enter the following name servers and click save:
ns1.digitalocean.com
ns2.digitalocean.com
ns3.digitalocean.com
Step 2: Navigate to Digital Ocean to Configure DNS settings
Now that we have updated the DNS records we can navigate back to Digital Ocean and Under the Create tab we’ll go to Domains/DNS
Here we can add our custom domain and link it to our Droplet, we’ll click Add Domain, click on our domain, and add an A record.
This will direct our domain to the IP of our Droplet.
Under Hostname, we’ll enter @, select your digital ocean droplet, change TTL to 60 and hit create record.
Step 3: Obtain SSL Certification
Next, we’ll head over to Urbit and open our terminal.
We’ll need to run a few commands to request an SSL certification. In our Urbit terminal enter the following command:
:acme &path /customdomain.com/domain
Note: replace customdomain.com with the domain you intend to use.
Follow up by trying to access your domain. If everything is working properly you should be directed to your Urbit login screen.
Congratulations! You can now access your Urbit ship at any time you want through your custom domain.
Exploring Landscape + Known Urbit Apps
Now that we have our basic settings up and running we can dive into the Urbit landscape and explore a little more!
Currently, Urbit’s most prominent use cases are similar to that of Discord, featuring private and public group chats, shared journals, collections, and blogs. This is merely the beginning.
Urbit gives developers a new platform to build decentralized applications for the only decentralized private operating system.
Developers on Urbit have been hard at work, bringing innovative new applications to this incredible new landscape. You can search for applications on the Home Screen through the developer, or by looking up the name of the application.
We have compiled a list of known applications (and their developers) below!
Developer: ~paldev
Verse - a random bible verse, every day
Picture - collective picture frame for the garden
Face - see your friends
Pals - a very basic friend discovery app
Fafa - 2 Factor Authentication
Rumors - anonymous gossip from friends of friends
Cliff - A file system explorer
Developer: ~pocwet
Journal - Personal diary/ blog
Docs - User and Developer documentation for Urbit apps
Developer ~tirrel
Studio - Tools for making money on Urbit
Developer : ~littel-wolfur
Chess - Fully P2P Chess on Urbit
urChatFM - 2-way Video Calling
Zone - World clock for every time zone
Orca - Podchatting
Above is a list of known applications tested, and approved, by yours truly!
Urbit gives power to the people, and the power to create revolutionary applications that can transform the landscape into the next generation of surfing the internet.
That’s it for our complete guide to Urbit dummies!
Now that you have your planet up and running, explore some of the applications (or make your own!)
The possibilities are endless!
We’ll see all your crypto dummies next week!