How to verify your domain on Github using bind9 DNS
Nowadays many small businesses tend to buy a hosting and a mail service from web hosting providers. But I believe there is a much better way. Yes, I am talking VPS, dedicated or even better, a collocation. That way you get the whole server to yourself, which means you can install any system you like and configure it the way you want.
Therefore, when we were started our small business, we decided to buy a physical server and go to town on it. Now we have our own system with web and mail servers, DNS, and a bunch of virtual machines for different tasks. Also, we have a GitHub organization page where we store our open source projects and ideas.
One day I noticed that our GitHub organization page says our domain is not verified yet. I thought that day: “Ok, why not?”. When I started to scroll down the GitHub how-to page, I saw some screenshots depicting certain DNS records and I started wondering how to configure such records in BIN9 DNS server.
To solve this, I had to create a TXT record in a forward lookup zone (this TXT record depends on your organization name and domain). Because it was my first experience verifying domain with TXT records using Bind9 DNS server, the main issue was to combine all these values: a specific domain record and a value in a TXT record.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a copy-and-paste solution. So, I did some digging and eventually came up with a way to do this. Here it is:
_github-challenge-Wissance.wissance.com. TXT 4d5dff83e6
After sudo bind9 restart you could try to use dig command to check if your record applied successfully:
_github-challenge-Wissance.wissance.com +nostats +nocomments +nocmd
And if you see something like the text below it means that you properly created your TXT record. After that there is only one thing left to do. Press button and finish domain verification process.
TXT
;; global options: +cmd
;_github-challenge-Wissance.wissance.com. IN TXT
_github-challenge-Wissance.wissance.com. 10800 IN TXT “4d5dff83e6”
