route53-dyndns

route53-dyndns is a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) updater for Route53.

It provides a dyndns2-compatible interface to enable your preferred client to update your DNS settings in Route53.

For the technically-minded - and if you're running this, you probably are! - route53_dyndns consists of an Amazon API Gateway API that proxies an AWS Lambda function that updates Route53 settings.

Getting Started

To run route53_dyndns you will need to run the included Terraform script that configures the necessary AWS resources. This is done from a Gulp command.

The deploy script assumes that you already have an AWS account, and that you have installed the AWS Command Line and Terraform.

You may need to run the following command (see here for details):

export AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG=1

Once you have set up your AWS environment as above, you can run the following commands to deploy the AWS resources for the updater service:

npm install
terraform init
gulp build
gulp deploy

After deploying the service, you will also need to set up some values in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. These parameters hold the username and password that secure your DDNS service. You will need these values to configure the DDNS client.

aws ssm put-parameter --name /dyndns/<stage-name>/username --type SecureString --value <my-dns-username>
aws ssm put-parameter --name /dyndns/<stage-name>/password --type SecureString --value <my-dns-password>

(The parameter names are output when you run gulp deploy).

Stages

route53_dyndns supports a form of deployment stages, so that you can try it in a test environment before running in live. Each stage can have different settings, which are controlled by stage variables in the API Gateway.

To specify a deployment stage, use the -s <stagename> switch when calling gulp deploy. You will need to create a corresponding <stagename>.tfvars file. Two such files are included in the source (default.tfvars and dev.tfvars).

Stage variables

Variable	Description
username_param	The name of the SSM param that holds the username used to secure the DDNS service.
password_param	The name of the SSM param that holds the password used to secure the DDNS service.
log_debug	A boolean value that indicates whether to log debug information.

Testing

You can test manually by calling the API directly, e.g.:

https://mydnsuser:mypassword@my-lambda.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/live/nic/update?hostname=hostname.example.com&myip=1.2.3.4