Integration with Third-Party DNS Services

By default, a Plesk server acts as a master DNS server for websites hosted on it. Alternatively, you can use external third-party DNS services to resolve domain names hosted in Plesk, for example, Amazon Route 53 (http://aws.amazon.com/route53/), DynECT (http://dyn.com/dns/dynect-managed-dns/), or Godaddy Premium DNS (http://www.godaddy.com/domains/dns-hosting.aspx). Using such services has certain advantages:

• Reduced load on your Plesk server.
• Improved DNS hosting reliability.

If you plan to use an external third-party DNS service, you can configure your Plesk so that it uses this service instead of its own DNS server. This will not affect website owners: From their perspective, Plesk stays a master DNS server for their domains.

To make your Plesk automatically provision DNS zones to a third-party DNS, you should write an integration script.

DNS Integration Script

The integration script is a script (written in any language supported by your server) that propagates changes made to DNS zones in Plesk UI to the selected third-party DNS service. The script should communicate with the external service by means of the service's API.

After you register the script in Plesk, the latter will pass to the script information about any change in DNS zones, for example, adding or removing resource records or entire zones.

The script must meet the following requirements:

• It should be able to process the input parameters given in the table below.
• If the actions are completed successfully, the script should return errorcode0.
• If you want your script to write information about its execution to Plesk log files, send this information to the script's stdout and sterr.

An example of the script that integrates Plesk with the Amazon Route 53 is available on our GitHub page.

Note that to use this script, you should take two steps:

• Download the library for working with Amazon Web Services in PHP - aws.phar from http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforphp/ and place it in the same directory with the script.
• Specify your Amazon security credentials in the script (lines 23 and 24):

  'client' => array(

  'key' => '<key>',

  'secret' => '<secret>',

  ),

Integration Script Input Parameters

Note: All parameters are of the string type.

Integrating Plesk with a Third-Party DNS

To switch on Plesk integration with third-party DNS:

1. Put your integration script into your extension's /plib/scripts/ directory. For example: /plib/scripts/route53.php.
2. Make sure that your script can be executed successfully from command line:

On Linux: plesk bin extension --exec <extension_id> <script_name>

On Windows: <plesk_dir>\bin\extension.exe --exec <extension_id> <script_name>

For example: plesk bin extension --exec route53 route53.php

1. Setup post-install.php script to register custom DNS backend with the following command line utility:

On Linux: plesk bin server_dns --enable-custom-backend <script_execution>

On Windows: <plesk_dir>\bin\server_dns.exe --enable-custom-backend <script_execution>

For example:

$script = 'plesk bin extension --exec route53 route53.php';
$result = pm_ApiCli::call('server_dns', ['--enable-custom-backend', $script]);

To switch off Plesk integration with third-party DNS and restore the default settings:

1. Setup the pre-uninstall.php script to disable custom DNS backend with the following command line utility:

On Linux: plesk bin server_dns --disable-custom-backend

On Windows: <plesk_dir>\bin\server_dns.exe --disable-custom-backend

For example:

$result = pm_ApiCli::call('server_dns', ['--disable-custom-backend']);

You can find a complete example of the integration on github: https://github.com/plesk/ext-route53