COREDNS-AUTO(7)

🦋 COREDNS-AUTO 🦋

okay so bestie, this is the auto manual page from the CoreDNS plugins collection — and no cap, it's lowkey one of the most "set it and forget it" plugins out there 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

auto — it enables serving zone data from an RFC 1035-style master file, and the whole vibe is that this file gets automatically picked up from disk 🌸

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

The auto plugin is your "old-style" DNS server era 🎀 It serves from a preloaded file that exists on disk — very main character, very reliable.

If the zone file contains signatures (i.e. it's signed, i.e. it's using DNSSEC), then correct DNSSEC answers are returned 🫶 But listen — only NSEC is supported! Not NSEC3, bestie, NSEC. If you go with this setup, you are the responsible one for re-signing the zonefile. That's your job, not the plugin's 🙈

New or changed zones get automatically picked up from disk only when SOA's serial changes ⭐ And if the zones aren't being updated via a zone transfer, then the serial must be manually changed. Like, by hand. With your own hands. 😭

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🌈 SYNTAX 🌈

auto [ZONES...] {
    directory DIR [REGEXP ORIGIN_TEMPLATE]
    reload DURATION
}

• ZONES — the zones it should be authoritative for 👑 If it's empty, the zones from the configuration block are used instead.
• directory — loads zones from the specified DIR 📁 If a file name matches REGEXP, then that regex is used to extract the origin. ORIGIN_TEMPLATE gets used as a template for the origin. Strings like {<number>} are replaced with the respective matches in the file name — so {1} is the first match, {2} is the second, etc. ✨

The default is: db.(.*) {1} — meaning from a file named db.example.com, the extracted origin will be example.com. So cute, so convenient 💖

⚠️ REGEXP must not be longer than 10000 characters. That's the limit, bestie. Also REGEXP is unanchored 🫠 so use ^ and $ if you need the match to cover the full file name — for example ^(.*).zone$ to avoid matching backup files like example.org.zone.bak. Protect yourself 💀

• reload — the interval for performing reloads of zones when the SOA version changes, and of zonefiles 📚 It specifies how often CoreDNS should scan the directory to watch for file removal and addition. Default is one minute ⏰ A value of 0 means don't scan for changes and don't reload, periodt. e.g. 30s checks the zonefile every 30 seconds and reloads the zone when the serial changes 🔥

For enabling zone transfers, go look at the transfer plugin 👀

All the directives from the file plugin are supported 🎀 Note that auto will load all the zones it finds, even though the directive might only receive queries for a specific zone. I.e:

. {
    auto example.org {
        directory /etc/coredns/zones
    }
}

This will happily pick up a zone for example.COM — except it will never be queried, because the auto directive is only authoritative for example.ORG 🙈 slay, but also, oops.

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

Load org domains from /etc/coredns/zones/org and allow transfers to the internet, but send notifies to 10.240.1.1 💌

org {
    auto {
        directory /etc/coredns/zones/org
    }
    transfer {
        to *
        to 10.240.1.1
    }
}

Load org domains from /etc/coredns/zones/org and look for file names like www.db.example.org, where example.org is the origin. Scan every 45 seconds. ⏱️

org {
    auto {
        directory /etc/coredns/zones/org www\.db\.(.*) {1}
        reload 45s
    }
}

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🌟 ALSO 🌟

Use the root plugin to help you specify the location of the zone files 🗂️ And see the transfer plugin to enable outgoing zone transfers 🦋

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 💅✨

this little icon was brought to you by CoreDNS, October 2026, and the manual page COREDNS-AUTO(7) — go forth and serve those zones 👑🌸