What does a client need to do in order to setup friendly names for DXP?

New clients will ask what steps are needed to properly setup friendly names in DXP. What should we tell them?

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As I understand it, the client will need to provide the friendly names for their environments to Optimizely via a support ticket. Ideally they will have at least one domain per environment, including one for production that won't be the final public domain. Something like:

• dev.opti.client.com
• uat.opti.client.com
• prod.opti.client.com

Or whatever terms the client prefers. These domains do not need to exist yet in DNS.

Once these have been provided to Optimizely support, Opti will respond with TXT records that will need to be created to verify ownership of the domains.

The client will create the TXT records and Opti will validate the domains. Once that's done, the friendly domain names can be created as CNAME records to the Opti environments. Those CNAME records will end in .dxcloud.episerver.net. and will be provided by Optimizely support.

For apex (AKA root) domains, Optimizely uses a redirect service to send traffic to a non-apex (usually www) subdomain. Cloudflare can't be used with apex domains (because it uses CNAME records). So if the client wants to support HTTPS on the apex domain redirect, they'll need to provide Optimizely with a valid SSL cert for that domain, again through a support ticket.