Overview

When Appian Cloud environments are created, they are assigned a subdomain under the appiancloud.com domain. However, Appian Cloud customers can request to customize environment URLs to provide a personalized experience to end users. This page outlines the steps required to change the URL (also referred to as the Fully Qualified Domain Name or FQDN) of Appian Cloud environments to a custom domain.

Use case

Appian Cloud environments use 3 FQDNs. By default, these are:

• ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud.com - This is also known as the main FQDN of your environment.
• ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-static.com - This will be referred to as the Static FQDN from this point onwards.
• ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud-dynamic.com - This will be referred to as the Dynamic FQDN from this point onwards.

Only the first FQDN is visible to end users. You can choose to customize:

• All 3 FQDNs listed above; or
• Just the main FQDN, ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud.com.

As an example, let's say your company domain is mycorp.org and you have an environment called production-acme currently using the appiancloud.com domain, available at production-acme.appiancloud.com. You want to customize this environment to use mycorp.org so that end users can access the environment using the URL production-acme.mycorp.org.

You can decide to customize all 3 FQDNs:

You can also opt to customize only the main FQDN of your environment. Appian Cloud will take care of handling the remaining two domains:

Instructions

1. Decide on the FQDN(s) for the environments you wish to use a custom domain with.
2. Use Self-Service Certificate Management to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with the required information, including your organization details and the FQDNs of all of your environments.
3. Use the generated CSR to obtain a set of signed, PEM-formatted certificate files from your organization's certificate authority. Do not generate a separate key or reuse a previously provided CSR.
4. Use Self-Service Certificate Management to provide Appian with the issued certificate files.
5. Open a new support case with Appian Support to deploy your certificate files. Consult the documentation for VPN only or dual access configurations if you are setting up your environment in one of these access options, as additional steps are required.

Certificate renewal

To renew your certificate, follow the renewal steps in Self-Service Certificate Management

Frequently asked questions

Why do I need to set up three different domains?

The static and dynamic domains are used for background web requests to support features such as the Document Viewer Component and Component Plug-ins. These domains are needed for security purposes. Review the Post Install Configurations for more details.

Do I have to change the subdomain portion of my environment's FQDN?

You do not need to change the subdomain portion of your environment's FQDN.

What are the requirements surrounding the subdomain portion of the environment FQDN?

The subdomain portion of the environment FQDN must comply with the following requirements:

• Subdomains should be representative of your organization.
• Subdomains should be unique. That is, each subdomain must be different across environments.
• Subdomains cannot be generic or include the word "appian" in their name.