Put a Project on Your Own Domain

Custom domains are free on Surge, certificates included and provisioned for you. This is the whole path: from a domain at a registrar to live, with the platform telling you whose move it is at every step.

1. Publish to the domain

Don't wait for DNS—publish first:

surge ./dist example.com

The publish succeeds immediately (your files are on the CDN, staged), and the output reports the domain as waiting on dns along with the exact records to add. That status is the platform's honest answer to "why isn't it up yet?"—and it's the only step that's ever yours.

2. Point the domain at Surge

Pick one of the three ways in—compared in depth on Custom Domains:

Name servers   ns1.surge.world  ns2.surge.world  ns3.surge.world  ns4.surge.world
CNAME          geo.surge.world
A              138.197.235.123

Delegating to the name servers is recommended: geo-aware routing, the apex and every subdomain covered, and extra records managed from the CLI. Recreate any records the domain already depends on before you switch. Keeping DNS at your current provider? Use a CNAME for subdomains, and an A record (or your provider's ALIAS/ANAME) for the apex.

3. Watch it go live

surge example.com status

The domain moves through three states, and only the first is yours: waiting on dns (add the records above) → securing (DNS is right; Surge is provisioning the certificate—no action, no charge) → live (verified by real requests against the actual edge, not a dashboard's optimism). DNS propagation at your registrar is the only wait in the pipeline; Surge picks the domain up the moment the records are in place.

4. Force HTTPS

Once live, publish with --force https to redirect all plain-HTTP traffic permanently:

surge ./dist example.com --force https

The choice sticks as project configuration. To have browsers insist on HTTPS too, set an HSTS max-age: surge example.com config --hsts 31536000. More in SSL & HTTPS.

What you get

www folds into the apex automatically (or vice versa—whichever you publish is canonical). Every subdomain of a delegated domain is publishable as its own independent project—surge ./docs docs.example.com—each with its own revisions and settings. And the certificate renews itself forever; there is no step 5.

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