Migrate DNS provider from Cloudflare to AWS Route 53 with AWS CDK

My old domain fraserxu.me will be expire in a week, I decided to not renew it in favour of using my new domain fraserxu.dev.

Other than hosting my old blog on the root domain name which I will be stop using, I also have serval subdomains for my side projects such as hotdog.fraserxu.me that I want to keep. The goal is to migrate it to hotdog.fraserxu.dev.

Existing setup

The source code for hotdog.fraserxu.dev is on Github, deployed and hosted on Netlify as a static sites.

Netlify supports custom domains, new domains can be added through the Custom domains settings.

The old domain is using Cloudflare as the DNS provider, I just need to create a new CNAME record hotdog with contents point to the netlify url angry-heisenberg-6deadb.netlify.com from the Cloudflare web console.

New setup

My new domain fraserxu.dev is using AWS Route 53 as the DNS provider. I can do the same thing by just creating a new CNAME record from AWS web console. But for learning purpose, I decide to try AWS CDK using the @aws-cdk/aws-route53 module. I created a private repo on Github called infrastructure and plan to use it for this and other AWS resources I might be using in the future.

To start, use the cdk init command to create the app using TypeScript

cdk init app --language typescript

The init command created an empty stack in lib/infrastucture-stack.ts

export class InfrastructureStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props)
    // resources here
  }
}

For my case, I need the @aws-cdk/aws-route53 package from the AWS Construct Library.

npm install @aws-cdk/aws-route53

I’m already using Route 53 to manage my domain, so I can just import it from existing Hosted Zone. There’s a few different way to import existing Zone.

If I don’t know the ID of the Hosted Zone, I can use the HostedZone.fromLookup:

const zone = route53.HostedZone.fromLookup(this, "Zone", {
  domainName: "fraserxu.dev",
})

Alternatively, I can use the fromHostedZoneId if I know the hostedZoneId

const zone = HostedZone.fromHostedZoneId(this, 'Zone', {
  hostedZoneId: 'my-hosted-zone-id',
});

Once it’s imported, then we can add a new CNAME record using the route53.CnameRecord API

new route53.CnameRecord(this, "Hotdog", {
  zone,
  recordName: "hotdog",
  domainName: "angry-heisenberg-6deadb.netlify.app",
})

That’s it! Here’s the full example:

import * as cdk from "@aws-cdk/core"
import * as route53 from "@aws-cdk/aws-route53"

export class InfrastructureStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: cdk.Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props)

    const zone = route53.HostedZone.fromLookup(this, "Zone", {
      domainName: "fraserxu.dev",
    })

    new route53.CnameRecord(this, "Hotdog", {
      zone,
      recordName: "hotdog",
      domainName: "angry-heisenberg-6deadb.netlify.app",
    })
  }
}

This can be then be deployed with the cdk deploy command.