Power Pages custom domain and RRset conflict error

When you create a Power Pages site, it will be available under the “powerappsportals.com” domain. If you want it to be part of your actual Internet real estate, you may want to add it to your organisation’s domain. The process of adding a custom domain to the Power Pages website is well documented here. What’s omitted, though, is an interesting detail you may face when doing it yourself.

Let’s assume you want your portal to be part of a domain, e.g. “example.com“. There are 2 scenarios possible:

1. The Power Pages website is the only website on that domain.
2. The Power Pages portal (e.g., the partner portal) lives along with other resources on that domain, e.g., under the main website built using WordPress.

In either case, you would need to add a CNAME record to where your DNS zone is hosted (either your Azure service or GoDaddy or another).

Standalone Power Pages site

In the first instance, you will quickly discover that you cannot host Power Pages as “https://example.com” (“naked” domain). If you try to do so, you may receive an error “RRset example.com. IN CNAME: Conflicts with pre-existing RRset“.

It’s a bit of a cryptic message, but what it means is that CNAME cannot be on your root level if other records exist. And you are likely to have at least NS records to point to the name servers. This is how the Internet works.

What’s the answer here? Use “www.example.com”, instead of naked “example.com“. Then everything works fine.

Power Pages sub-site

If you need the Power Pages to integrate with the landscape of other digital applications on your domain, you need to allocate another subdomain to it. Instead of “www” as in the previous case, you can use something like “portal,” so it will be “portal.example.com.”

Don’t forget to set the website visibility to “Public” so anyone can see it

Original Post https://cloudminded.blog/2024/03/18/power-pages-custom-domain-and-rrset-conflict-error/