Wildcard DNS records

Normal DNS records map a domain name to one or multiple IP addresses or other associated resources to a specific domain name (a one-to-many mapping).

Wildcard DNS records allow you to have a many-to-many mapping, for example if you had hundreds or thousands of subdomains you wanted to point to the same resources. Wildcard records are used as the response for all subdomains that are not specifically covered by another DNS record.

Within Cloudflare, wildcard DNS records can be either proxied or DNS-only.

Create a Wildcard record

To create a wildcard DNS record, create a DNS record with an * in the Name field.

Type	Name	IPv4 address	Proxy status
A	*	192.0.2.1	Proxied

Warning

If your project is on Cloudflare Pages, note that wildcard custom domains are not supported. Refer to known issues for details.

You can also create a wildcard DNS record specifically for a deeper subdomain. For example, if you wanted to create a wildcard record on *.www.example.com, you would create a record with *.www in the name field.

Type	Name	IPv4 address	Proxy status
CNAME	*.www	example.com	Proxied

Aspects to consider

• Wildcards are only supported on the first label: This means that a hostname such as subdomain.*.example.com is not a wildcard on the level of the asterisk character. If you create a DNS record with that name, the asterisk is interpreted as the literal character * and not as the wildcard operator.

• You cannot create wildcards on multiple levels: If you create a DNS record on *.*.example.com, only the first asterisk is interpreted as a wildcard while the second one is interpreted as the literal * character.

• Specific DNS records take precedence over wildcard records: Wildcards will be applied for multiple levels, but a specific record on any equal or lower level will terminate anything on or below this specific record.

  Example

  If you have only these two records on your domain, A and TXT:

  Type	Name	Content
  A	*.example.com	192.0.2.3
  TXT	subdomain1.example.com	<some_text>

  The A wildcard record will be used for queries going to any subdomain of example.com except subdomain1.example.com or anything below that specific label (deeper.label.subdomain1.example.com).

  The wildcard will still be used for deeper labels that are not below the specific record on subdomain1.example.com — for example, deeper.label.subdomain2.example.com.

Availability

Customers on all plans can create and proxy wildcard DNS records.

Limitations

If you are using a partial zone setup for your DNS, Cloudflare does not automatically provision SSL/TLS certificates for your wildcard record.

For wildcard hostname certificates, certificate issuance and renewal varies based on the type of certificate you are using:

• Universal: Perform DCV using one of the available methods.
• Advanced: In most cases, you can opt for Delegated DCV, which greatly simplifies certificate management.

If you cannot use Delegated DCV, you need to use TXT based DCV for certificate issuance and renewal. This means you will need to place one TXT DCV token for every hostname on the certificate. If one or more of the hostnames on the certificate fails to validate, the certificate will not be issued or renewed.

This means that a wildcard certificate covering example.com and *.example.com will require two DCV tokens to be placed at the authoritative DNS provider. Similarly, a certificate with five hostnames in the SAN (including a wildcard) will require five DCV tokens to be placed at the authoritative DNS provider.

Additional information

For more information on wildcard records — as well as more details about their limitations — refer to the introductory blog post ↗.