Migrating from GoDaddy to Amazon Route53

Sep 11, 2012 dns route53 cli53 aws
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Due to the recent outage on GoDaddy a lot of people are reconsidering their DNS options. Amazon Route53 is a great option - cheap, flexible and well proven.

To migrate you first need to export a zone file for the domain from GoDaddy.

It’s been highlighted the zone files are slightly broken in CNAME records, so you may need run this fix over them:

$ perl -pe 's/(CNAME .+)(?!.)$/$1./i' broken.txt > fixed.txt

This adds the requisite trailing . to CNAME records that was missing.

Install route53:

$ pip install cli53

Now create the zone in route53:

$ cli53 create example.com

And import your zone file:

$ cli53 import example.com --file fixed.txt

Finally, change the root records for your domain to point to name servers for Route53 - see NameServers:

$ cli53 info example.com

Magic!