I have a RaspberryPi Flask website running on my local network. Instead of remembering the Pi's IP address or configuring my DNS, etc., I have come up with this system, which redirects a public URL to my private local site. I do this via the following.
First, I have a domain name that refers to my GitHub Pages site (zachburchill.ml --> burchill.github.io), using the normal CNAME method.
Then, I added an additional CNAME record to the registrar's account, for the subdomain scale.zachburchill.ml (named that because my local site is built around tracking my weight).
Now my registrar's record table looks like this:
| Name | Type | TTL | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 14440 | 192.30.252.153 | |
| A | 14440 | 192.30.252.154 | |
| WWW | CNAME | 14440 | burchill.github.io |
| SCALE | CNAME | 3600 | burchill.github.io |
Then I added the CNAME file to this directory and included the index.html file that automatically redirects the browser to the local site.
This worked well, but I realized I couldn't do something like http://scale.zachburchill.ml/weight_tracker/ and have it redirect to http://<local_ip>/weight_tracker/ since the weight_tracker page doesn't exist as a page in this public repo. I came up with a clever (in my opinion) workaround: since non-existent page requests are (generally) redirected to the /404.html/ page, I could make a 404 page that would get the URL the user was attempting to visit and redirect them to that page on the local site (via Javascript).
With that, I can type scale.zachburchill.ml/weight_tracker/ and have it directed to http://<local_ip>/weight_tracker/ automatically.