So I am trying to get a custom domain to work with my github pages user site. I have followed pretty much the standard procedure for doing this as follows: (recommended by github here too: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-an-apex-domain-and-www-subdomain/). Note I need both the apex domain (example.com) and the www subdomain (www.example.com) to resolve to my github pages user site at username.github.io (the website itself is a jekyll based blog and I have checked that it compiles successfully before I started this process)
I have tried contacting my registrar and they said that everything in the DNS record seem fine and they get the following results:
A records :
example.com. 21460 IN A 185.199.111.153
example.com. 21460 IN A 185.199.109.153
example.com. 21460 IN A 185.199.110.153
example.com. 21460 IN A 185.199.108.153
CNAME :
www.example.com. 7199 IN CNAME username.github.io.
As expected.
But I still get the following error in github (under the settings tab of the repository):
"Domain does not resolve to the GitHub Pages server. For more information, see https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/."
And when I try to access the site by typing either example.com or www.example.com, the browser redirects to https://example.com/ and I get the error (on Chrome):
ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
Note that there is a warning on the documentation by github saying:
Warning: If your domain has HTTPS enforcement enabled, GitHub Pages' servers will not automatically route redirects. You must configure www subdomain and root domain redirects with your domain registrar.
I have no idea how to get around this. I suspect this is the possible cause of the issue. So a solution might be to circumvent this redirection, I just do not know how I would do this.
For anyone stumbling across this. Actually I realized I have outlined the correct method to set this up with Github Pages. And this is in line with what is recommended by Github as of today and works perfectly well. Just make sure you wait for the DNS Propagation to take effect which in some cases might take up to 24hrs. And this is what the problem was in my case.