Setup

A partial (CNAME) setup allows you to use Cloudflare's reverse proxy while maintaining your primary and authoritative DNS provider.

Use this option to proxy only individual subdomains through Cloudflare when you cannot change your authoritative DNS provider. You will be able to create A, AAAA, and CNAME records, which are the DNS record types that can be proxied.

Note

A partial setup is only available to customers on a Business or Enterprise plan.

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Before you begin

1. Create a Cloudflare account and add your domain.

2. Choose Business or Enterprise as your plan.

3. If you are onboarding a new domain to Cloudflare, ignore the instructions to change your nameservers.

4. (Recommended) Plan for SSL/TLS certificates:

   If you are only using Universal SSL prior to converting your zone, a certificate will be provisioned for your subdomains only after each of the respective DNS records (step 3 below) are proxied. Refer to Enable Universal SSL for details.

   If your domain is sensitive to downtime, instead of using Universal SSL, consider using an advanced certificate with delegated DCV.

1. Convert your zone and review DNS records

1. On the Overview page, select Convert to CNAME DNS Setup.
2. Select Convert to confirm.
3. Save the information from the Verification TXT Record. If you lose the information, you can also access it by going to DNS > Records > Verification TXT Record.
4. Make sure that you have all the DNS records (A, AAAA, or CNAME) for subdomains that you want to proxy through Cloudflare.

2. Verify ownership for your domain

Add the Verification TXT Record at your authoritative DNS provider. Cloudflare will verify the TXT record and send a confirmation email. This can take up to a few hours.

Example verification record

A verification record for example.com might be:

Type	Name	Content
TXT	cloudflare-verify.example.com	966215192-518620144

Note

If your authoritative DNS provider automatically appends DNS record name fields with your domain, make sure to only insert cloudflare-verify as the record name. Otherwise, it may result in an incorrect record name, such as cloudflare-verify.example.com.example.com.

After creating the record, you can use this Dig Web Interface link ↗ to search (dig) for cloudflare-verify.<YOUR DOMAIN> and validate if it is working.

That record must remain in place for as long as your domain is active on the partial setup on Cloudflare.

If your organization has multiple Cloudflare accounts, also consider using zone holds to have more control over domain ownership.

3. Add DNS records

1. At your authoritative DNS provider:

   1. Create CNAME records pointing to {your-hostname}.cdn.cloudflare.net for every hostname you wish to proxy through Cloudflare.

   Example CNAME record at authoritative DNS provider

   The CNAME record for www.example.com would be:

   www.example.com CNAME www.example.com.cdn.cloudflare.net

   2. Remove any previously existing A, AAAA, or CNAME records referencing the hostnames you want to proxy through Cloudflare. For these hostnames, leave only the records pointing to {your-hostname}.cdn.cloudflare.net.

2. Repeat this process for each subdomain that should be proxied to Cloudflare.

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Other record types

If you are preparing a conversion from partial to full setup, or if you have a more specific use case, you can use the Create DNS Record API endpoint to create DNS records of any supported type.

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