Your own domain

You get yourschool.plugboard.app immediately, and you can move to your own domain at any time. Most schools do, because staff trust a link on a domain they recognise and a service desk sends a lot of links.

Making the change

1. Tell us the hostname you want, for example helpdesk.yourschool.org.

2. Add the CNAME we give you:

   helpdesk.yourschool.org.  CNAME  yourschool.plugboard.app.

3. We issue the certificate and set your tenant’s primaryDomain.

Nothing else changes. Same instance, same data, same URL paths.

Both addresses keep working, so links already sent do not break. Tell us if you would rather the old one redirected instead.

Apex domains

yourschool.org with no subdomain needs a CNAME-flattening or ALIAS record, which not every DNS provider offers. A subdomain is simpler, and schools almost always want one anyway.

If your provider does support flattening, we can work with it. Say so when you ask.

What to update at the same time

Two things live outside Plugboard and will break quietly if you forget them.

Your identity provider. SSO redirect URIs are absolute. Add the new one before the switch, keep both registered during the change, then remove the old one afterwards. Skipping this locks everyone out of SSO at the exact moment of cutover.

Anything that links in. Intranet pages, printed QR codes on the service desk counter, an entry in your school app. Old links keep working while both hostnames resolve, but at some point somebody will turn one off.

What we handle

• The certificate and its renewal.
• The tenant’s primaryDomain, which is how a request is matched to your deployment.
• Keeping the old hostname serving so nothing breaks mid-change.

How the matching works

For completeness, since it explains the one error message people see. A request is matched in this order:

1. An explicit x-tenant-slug header, for API clients.
2. The Host header against primaryDomain. This is your custom domain.
3. The first label of the hostname as a tenant slug, which is how yourschool.plugboard.app works.
4. A default slug, used only on single-tenant self-hosted installs.

If you see Unknown tenant: helpdesk, primaryDomain has not been set or does not match the Host header. It is compared lower-cased and without the port. Tell us and it is a one-line fix.

Email links

Every link the product emails is built from your public origin, so tracking links, password reset links and parent notifications all switch to the new hostname when the change lands. You do not have to do anything for this, but it is worth knowing that a tracking link sent last term still points at the old hostname, so we keep it resolving.

Self-hosted

If you host it yourself, this is your job rather than ours, and the mechanics are different. See your own domain under self-hosting.