Wildcard subdomains

[stevekrouse]

https://discord.com/channels/1020432421243592714/1191861777915465728/1192146955363700767

[stevekrouse]

I personally think that the simple way to do this is to map a wildcard subdomain to a single val, and then that val can act as a "router", sending on the request to whatever other vals it might want to go to.

[Xkonti]

My instant thoughts on that solution:

• definitely a cool idea that would allow for some fancy routing scenarios
• we're dealing with 2 cold starts if we're passing the request via HTTP
• we're using up 2 Val executions if we're passing the request via HTTP
• we might be loosing some tracing and security features that might be coming to Val Town in the future if we're passing the request around
• if you're creating an HTTP Val programmatically and want it served via wildcard (would love that feature) you need to also update the router Val programmatically, which might me more challenging
• if this "routing" simply imports an appropriate Val instead of calling it via HTTP my intuition suggests that we might have more complications/incompatibilities in the future.

[nbbaier]

if you're creating an HTTP Val programmatically and want it served via wildcard (would love that feature) you need to also update the router Val programmatically, which might me more challenging

What would you do with this feature?

[Xkonti]

Let's say you have some kind of service that allows users to code something in a visual way, them it's sent to the backend. Backend generates Typescript code and deploys it as a custom Val. Then the user can use the deployed API.

[just-be-dev]

This is how I intuitively thought custom subdomains would work. I very much wanted to set up the same thing: val.just-be.dev and have that as the portal to my vals. When I signed up I was a little surprised that it was a one-to-one mapping to a particular domain. The trouble with the current approach is that it requires you to touch your registrar DNS config for every val.

I threw together an open source reverse proxy on cloudflare workers last night to demonstrate the behavior I'd like.

Here's a simple val that I wrote: https://just_be-hi.web.val.run. You can now access this val at https://hi.val.just-be.dev. Going to https://val.just-be.dev just forwards you to my val.town profile.

The reverse proxy I wrote isn't perfect and certainly won't work for everyone. You've got to be familiar with cloudflare workers and how to deploy them for one. It also requires enabling Total TLS on cloudflare for the wildcard domain to have proper certificates. That's gated behind an advanced cert feature that cloudflare charges $10 a month for. The other big downside to my approach is that when someone's viewing my profile the URLs they see are still the *.web.val.run URLs. From a product perspective, showing the custom wildcard domain could give non-premium users a bit of fomo which could drive more premium sales.

[pomdtr]

Just wanted to mention that if you ever want to move to <val>.<owner>.web.val.run, it's quite easy to achieve using on-demand TLS:

https://caddy.community/t/serving-tens-of-thousands-of-domains-over-https-with-caddy/11179

It would also be neat if the <owner> would map to <owner>.web.val.run (instead of <owner>.<owner>.web.val.run).