Question

Photo of Adam Neuerburg

0

Launching site and making it public

4

I am using Azure for our server. I have Rock installed and can access Rock through localhost...but now how do I make this live and link to our current website? We use squarespace for our church website. The "how to" guides went through the process of installing Rock, but not making it live on the web. I have the site created on IIS Manager. Would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks in advance. 

  • Photo of Adam Neuerburg

    0



    There's a couple screenshots (more or less of where I'm at) 


  • Photo of Jim Michael

    0

    Ok, first thing... do you know where your church domain is hosted, and if you have access to modify records in it? The gist is that you're doing to need a new DNS hostname for both the Rock internal site, and one for any public-facing pages you want users to use with Rock like online giving, group finder, event registrations, etc.

    Most churches use rock.yourdomain.com for the internal site, and when NOT using Rock as the full public www site, often something like my.yourdomain.com (assuming you're just going to point at a few public Rock pages for special functionality your main Squarespace site can't do). In both cases you'll need to create "A" records in your DNS that point at your Azure web server's public IP address. Example, and A record for rock.yourdomain.com and another for my.yourdomain.com You'll probably also need to open port 80 and 443 in the Azure firewall to get public access (I don't use Azure so can't speak to specifics there).

    Once you have your DNS configured correctly, you'll want to add "bindings" (you can see the link in your screen shot) in IIS Manager for the RockRMS website. You will again create bindings for rock.yourdomain.com and my.yourdomain.com (one each for port 80 and 443, likely). This tells IIS to "listen" for requests to those DNS hostnames and forward them to the Rock application.

    Finally, within Rock itself under Admin | CMS Config you will edit the Internal site DNS name to be rock.yourdomain.com and the External site to be my.yourdomain.com


    That's the _basics_ in a nutshell, hope some of it makes sense (if you're not a web admin, it can seem like greek!) If you can't progress then perhaps give us actual hostnames/domain you are wanting to use so we can give better examples... but the FIRST thing is to know how to modify the public DNS records for your existing church domain.

  • Photo of Adam Neuerburg

    0

    Thanks for the reply Jim. I did add an A Record into Bluehost (where our domain is hosted), as listed above. Is there something special I need to do to get the rock.mydomain.com web address? 

    • Jim Michael

      Jim Michael

      I'm not seeing where you've added a new A record for Rock... is it the "churchcrm" record? I also can't see your domain in that picture. Anyway, if churchcrm.yourdomain.com is what you want to use instead of rock.yourdomain.com. that's fine... you'll just need to add the binding for churchcrm.yourdomain.com in IIS and to the Site in Rock.

    • Photo of Adam Neuerburg

      0

      Hey Michael & Jim, still unfortunately in process of trying to get ROCK RMS live. This project was on the backburner for a few months and now I'm back to it. 

      • Michael Garrison

        Michael Garrison

        Adam, I missed this response in a flood of other notifications, sorry! Are all your settings, configurations and records still configured as shown above?