Configuring Dynamic DNS for NameCheap with ddclient on Raspberry-Pi

17 Feb 2018

I’ve recently found my name server host (namecheap) supports Dynamic DNS updating of records, so I’ve added a tool called ddclient to my Raspberry Pi

Here is how I have installed and configured this on Raspbian Jessie Lite (Nov 2017)

Installing ddclient

sudo apt install ddclient libio-socket-ssl-perl

I’m reasonably sure that the libio-socket-ssl-perl will be installed as part of ddclient anyway, but just in case this is added too.

When you install ddclient you also have to follow through some text/GUI I skipped this, and typed nonsense to get past.

Creating the config file

Edit the config file as such sudo nano /etc/ddclient.conf

Each of these lines is specific to NameCheap’s config, and we’ve added ssl=yes to ensure the updating is over SSL, as the password NameCheap give can update any record.

• protocol in this case is “namecheap”
• server is the hostname of the dynamic DNS server. The dynamic DNS servers used by namecheap are “dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com”
• login is your domain name
• password is the string from the namecheap web interface. Leave the single quotation marks around the string.
• The last line is the subdomain to be modified. If you wanted to update your root domain, you would put an @ symbol on this line instead

Installing the ddclient service

nano /etc/default/ddclient

Add in the line run_daemon=true and ensure the other two options are set to false.

We also need to ensure this is installed as a service, and restarts at bootup so

systemctl enable ddclient.service will install this as a service on Raspbian, for other O/S check the link DigitalOcean Linux Services Guide

Some content (and a lot more detail) from: Sam Hobbs