Remove wildcard domains for Flywheel cloud platform upgrade

Before upgrading your site to the Flywheel Cloud platform, any wildcard domains should be removed from the Domains card on the site’s dashboard. This will help to avoid conflicts during the upgrade process.

Why was my upgrade paused?

If Flywheel detects a wildcard domain is listed for a particular site, it will pause the upgrade process and a notification will display in Communication Center.

You can see which site is being paused by visiting the Cloud Platform upgrade page. Removing the wildcard domain for the site will unpause the upgrade.
Once the upgrade is complete, the wildcard domain can be re-added (if necessary).

What is a wildcard domain?

Wildcard domains are formatted with an asterisk as the leftmost part of a domain name, for example *.southpawscissors.xyz.

The wildcard domain applies to all subdomains following this URL convention (e.g. blog.southpawscissors.xyz or store.southpawscissors.xyz), allowing your Flywheel site to connect to any subdomain or wildcard DNS record pointed to the site’s IP.

While there are benefits to using wildcard domains, the best practice on Flywheel is to add each required subdomain manually.

Remove a wildcard domain from the site dashboard

1. Navigate to the site’s dashboard.
2. Find the wildcard domain in the list of domains, click the 3 dot menu, and select Delete Domain.
   
3. Excellent! You’ll receive an email notification when your site’s upgrade window has been scheduled. At this point, we recommend adding your subdomains manually by following the instructions below.

Recommended – add subdomains manually

After removing the wildcard domain, you can optionally add the specific subdomain(s) for your site. If you complete this step, you likely won’t need to have wildcard domain re-added post-upgrade.

Subdomains are formatted like this: subdomain.mydomain.comor blog.southpawscissors.xyz.

1. In the Domains card, click the + button in the top right.
2. Enter your subdomain, leave both the boxes unchecked, and click Add Domain.
   
3. Repeat as necessary for any other subdomains. Depending on how the site is set up, there may be several.

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!