Zonefile example¶
On this page we give an example of a basic zone file and it’s contents.
We recommend using the nsd-checkzone tool to verify that you have a working zone.
Creating a zone¶
A zone needs a SOA (Source Of Authority) record. For the exact structure we refer you to the wiki page. Note that all records must Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) which adds a .
to the domain name. In this example the FQDN is: example.com.
. This is in contrast to relative domain names, where the origin gets appended (so in the example below, www
gets expanded to www.example.com.
).
Also note that @
symbol in the zone file refers to the $ORIGIN
parameter.
To have multi-line resource records opening and closing brackets can be used to ignore linebreaks. Finally, if a name at the start of a record is missed, the name from the previous entry gets used (This is why all three A records are equivalent).
$ORIGIN example.com. ; 'default' domain as FQDN for this zone
$TTL 86400 ; default time-to-live for this zone
example.com. IN SOA ns.example.com. noc.dns.icann.org. (
2020080302 ;Serial
7200 ;Refresh
3600 ;Retry
1209600 ;Expire
3600 ;Negative response caching TTL
)
; The nameserver that are authoritative for this zone.
NS example.com.
; these A records below are equivalent
example.com. A 192.0.2.1
@ A 192.0.2.1
A 192.0.2.1
@ AAAA 2001:db8::3
; A CNAME redirect from www.exmaple.com to example.com
www CNAME example.com.
mail MX 10 example.com.