Connecting your domain

Right after installation the tracker answers on your server’s IP address over plain HTTP. To send real traffic through it you need a domain: campaign URLs must be stable, and ad platforms reject links without HTTPS.

Exort issues and renews certificates automatically. You add the domain in two places — DNS and the tracker — and the certificate appears on the first HTTPS request.

DNS records

Create an A record pointing at your server’s IP address.

Type	Name	Value
A	track	your server IP

That gives you track.example.com. To use the bare domain instead, create the A record with the name @.

A few practical notes:

• Use a subdomain for tracking, not your main domain. If a tracking domain gets flagged by an ad platform, you swap it out without touching anything else.

• Wait for propagation. A new record usually resolves within minutes, but it can take longer. Check it before moving on:

  dig +short track.example.com

  The output must be your server IP. If it is empty or shows something else, the certificate will fail to issue.

• Behind Cloudflare? Keep the record DNS only (grey cloud) while you set the domain up. Proxying changes how certificates are issued and how visitor IP addresses reach the tracker.

Adding the domain in Exort

The tracker only issues certificates for domains it knows about, so DNS alone is not enough.

1. Open Domains in the admin panel.

2. Click Add Domain.

3. Enter the domain — one per line, or comma-separated if you are adding several at once:

   track.example.com
   go.example.com

4. Pick an Index Page — what the bare domain returns when someone opens it without a campaign link:

   • Blank Page — responds 200 with an empty body. This is the default.
   • 404 — responds 404 Not Found.

5. Optionally assign a Group to keep domains organised.

6. Save.

To make a domain the default for new campaign URLs, open it and mark it as default.

Verifying HTTPS

Certificates are issued on demand: the first HTTPS request for a domain triggers issuance, so there is nothing to run by hand. Open the domain in a browser, or:

curl -sI https://track.example.com/ | head -1

The first request may take a few seconds while the certificate is obtained. After that the Domains page shows the status:

Status	Meaning
SSL not yet issued	The domain is registered, but no HTTPS request has arrived yet. Open it once.
SSL active	Certificate issued and valid. Nothing to do.
Certificate expired!	Renewal did not go through — check that DNS still points at this server.
Inactive	The domain is banned in the tracker and will not receive a certificate.

The status is refreshed in the background every couple of minutes, so allow a short delay before it updates in the panel.

If the certificate does not appear

Work through these in order:

1. Check that DNS actually resolves to this server. dig +short your-domain must return your server IP. This is the most common cause by a wide margin.
2. Check that the domain is added in the tracker. A certificate request for an unknown domain is refused — deliberately, so that nobody can point their own domain at your server and mint certificates on it.
3. Wait out the cooldown. After a failed attempt the tracker blocks retries for that domain for one hour. That protects you from the certificate authority’s rate limits, which would lock the domain out for much longer. Fix the cause first, then retry.
4. Check that port 443 is open. Certificate validation relies on an inbound connection to your server, and a firewall in front of it breaks issuance silently.
5. Check that the domain is not banned on the Domains page.