I would like to set some SSL certificates for one app I have on heroku (a simple application based on nodeJS + Vue).
I know if I upgrade to the Hobby Plan (7$ for month) I can have it automatically.
But for now it would too much money for a test application, so I am wondering if I can achieve some similar goal also with a Free Plan.
so:
Is it possible to set SSL certificate for an app on Heroku JUST with the Free Plan?
Maybe in a complicated/tricky way via CLI?
From the Heroku pages and documentation it looks not possible.
But I have to ask :)
Here I have a better approach to deal with this. As Heroku Doesn't provide SSL for Free Plan.
But You can use Cloudflare which gives free SSL.
You can Use Cloudflare As Bridge For SSL.
Requirement:
Cloudflare Account
Your Application should not have inbuild SSL redirection (like redirect-ssl)
Otherwise, This will result in Too Many Redirect Error
Step 1: Point Your domain to CloudFlare. You basically open an account an enter your domain when prompted. You may be given instructions to change your domain name servers.
Step 2: Add Cname Record of Heroku Server in DNS of Cloudflare. Instructions are here
Here You will get Some SSL Security Issue.
Step 3: Now Change Your SSL/TLS encryption mode to Flexible (Not Full). *Important
Now Understand the Working:-
Client(Browser) Make Request to https://example.com
First, the request reaches the Cloudflare with SSL. (User see encrypted connection to the server.)
Then Cloudflare makes request to Heroku Server(Origin) with Non-SSL (Non-Https and Unencrypted).
Then Heroku Server (Origin) returns the Response with Non-SSL to Cloudflare.
At the end Cloudflare forward the request to Client (Browser.)
You might think, What is the benefit of just encrypting half system.
but "Something is better then nothing".
You are here because you don't want to spent money on heroku paid dynos.
This method is better for those who is using http. Atleast it protects the most vulnerable side (client side). Where most of the attack happen. There is very less chances of attack between cloudflare and your server. Because of network reach.
Having less vulnerable probability is better then 100% vulnerable system
I have tested this method and working on https://www.auedbaki.com
Late response but I'm adding here I just spent an hour trying to setup SSL with Heroku - resulting in a dead end.
The bottom line is that Heroku mentions they offer free SSL certificates but that's really not the case unless you have a Hobby ($7/mo) or Pro plan.
This link has more details and feedback from other users facing the same issue.
The answer above about LetsEncrypt is incorrect. Although you can get a free certificate, it cannot be included in a free Heroku app.
Other users have pointed to this article with a step-by-step guide but the guide is outdated and the 'Labs' option mentioned does not work with Heroku anymore.
see comments below for some alternative suggestions
In my specific case, I was able to get a free SSL on zeit.
Here's how you get FULL SSL using Cloudflare for FREE.
Step 1: Point Your domain to CloudFlare. You basically open an account an enter your domain when prompted. You may be given instructions to change your domain name servers.
Step 2: Add Cname Record of Heroku Server in DNS of Cloudflare. Instructions are here. Here You will get Some SSL Security Issue.
Step 3: Now Change Your SSL/TLS encryption mode to Full
Step 4: In your DNS settings, you’ll want to create a CNAME: yourdomain.com -> yourapp.herokuapp.com.
(I learned about the general approach here https://mikecoutermarsh.com/adding-ssl-to-heroku-with-cloudflare/ Although it's old, it still works.
I had this issue also. I wanted to set up a custom domain for my free account on Heroku for my React App. I searched so much info on the web and read loads of documents from Heroku support.
The conclusion is that on the Heroku free account, a custom domain name with SSL certificate cannot be setup. If you need SSL with your custom domain name, you need to upgrade to any of their paid hosting accounts.
Heroku does provide SSL certificate for their free account as long as it is not using a custom domain name. So the standard free account URL will be something like this "https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com"
NB. Google Firebase allows free hosting and Custom Domain name with SSL, for up to a certain amount of traffic before charging. For testing an app, this will be a perfect alternative. I am using it. And it was easy to set up my custom domain.
I hope this saves you hours of searching.
Since you don't make explicit if you need to apply the SSL certificate to a custom domain, I think it's necessary to say that according to the Heroku documentation:
Apps using free dynos can use the *.herokuapp.com certificate if they
need SSL.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl
Maybe future readers could find this answer helpful...
If you are using
1]free heroku,
You can't use 1)free ssl or 2)paid ssl
2]paid heroku
1)you get free ssl 2)you can use paid ssl also
Solution
1]get paid heroku
2]move to netlify or other alternatives
Free SSL in Heroku doesn't exist, or let me just say that it's impossible to achieve it on a free plan.
For you to be able to include any form of third party SSL in Heroku, be it paid SSL or Free Third Party SSL, you have to change to Hobby or Professional dynos for the SSL to work.
An easier option, if you're using Heroku, there's no need to buy a third party SSL. Just change to Hobby or Professional dynos.
For you to be able to change the dyno type, select your app, go to sources section on the upper part, just bellow it, click on the Change Dyno Type button.
Hobby Dyno will cost you $7 a month while Professional Dyno will cost you $25 - $500 a month.
After all that, remember to go to your Rails App:
Go to; .../config/environments/production.rb
--> Uncomment the following line:
# config.force_ssl = true
---> To:
config.force_ssl = true
After that, you'll be able to achieve your SSL but not FREE.
If you don't mind hosting your frontend on another service you can host it in Vercel, with free SSL, while you keep your backend at Heroku. Quite straightforward!
https://vercel.com/
One way around this could be setting up a proxy server on a host you can set SSL certificates on and then simply forward requests to the free herokudns domain using encryption as well.
You'd have to have a separate server with something like nginx or httpd running.. I am not sure of a free service to host the proxy, but usually when you sign up for a domain you may get a hosting addon with it, or perhaps people already have acess to an encrypted host and just want to also use Heroku for their node applications.
Setting up a httpd proxy would look somewhat like this (from https://serverfault.com/questions/84821/apache-proxypass-with-ssl):
<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>
ServerName customdomain.com
SSLProxyEngine On
SSLProxyCheckPeerCN on
SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire on
ProxyPass / https://heroku-app-name.herokuapp.com
ProxyPassReverse / https://heroku-app-name.herokuapp.com
</VirtualHost>
This way you have full encryption all the way :)
This is a question rather than an answer, actually. Has anyone tried ZeroSSL? It offers free SSL, and here is an installation guide for Heroku. However, SSL Endpoint is apparently deprecated and not recommended by Heroku, and it appears to be paid addon of Heroku.
$ cat example.crt ca_bundle.crt certificate.crt
I could not make sense of this line in the help. Perhaps, > is missing? Where does example.crt come from, when I only have the following files?
certificate.crt
ca_bundle.crt
private.key
Or can Heroku SSL accept SSL certificates issued from ZeroSSL?
Related
Im currently building an application that will reside at app.mydomain.com which is running on Heroku. All users will have their own entry points, like app.mydomain.com/client1, app.mydomain.com/client2, etc. I want clients to be able to setup their own domain (www.clientdomain.com) and cname it to their entry point. I understand this is pretty straight forward up until now.
All my DNS is handled by Cloudflare and I believe I can configure Cloudlfare into Full (Strict) mode, all I need to do is install their Origin Cert onto my Heroku dyno. This will ensure that all direct connects to my domain will be secure (going to app.mydomain.com/client1).
Question is, how does a client go about getting an SSL'ed connection for their domain; do I need to get a multidomain cert and start adding domains to it as I get clients, or am i supposed to install their cert onto Heroku (I believe I can only install 1 so thats a no go) or is it supposed to live on Cloudflare somewhere, or are there additional options I'm not seeing (I hope there are!).
Im not wondering what to do for my own domains, but rather, how do clients setup an SSL connection with their domains that resolve onto my servers.
This is rather perplexing!
The flow would be (I think):
User Browser -> Clients DNS -> (cname to) My Cloudflare -> Heroku
Hmm, it looks like this might be a pretty solid solution to this issue...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ssl-for-saas/
Edit - after clarification
I'm currently building an application that will reside at
app.mydomain.com which is running on Heroku. All users will have their
own entry points, like app.mydomain.com/client1,
app.mydomain.com/client2, etc. Question is, how does a client go about
getting an SSL'ed connection for their domain; do I need to get a
multidomain cert and start adding domains to it as I get clients?
If you are going to use the same Heroku app for all of your clients (I think this is a bad idea by the way, but you might be required to) - then yes - you should get a multi-domain certificate and keep adding domains to it as your list of clients expand.
Original answer - which explains SSL + Load Balancing on Heroku.
Im currently building an application that will reside at
app.mydomain.com which is running on Heroku. I was clients to be able
to setup their own domain www.clientdomain.com and cname it to mine.
You will need a wildcard certificate to cover your subdomain (for the app.mydomain.com). You'll have use that cert in heroku.
...all I need to do is install their Origin Cert onto my Heroku dyno.
You are correct - except it's not on your Heroku dyno, it's on your Heroku app endpoint. There's a good read here: https://serverfault.com/questions/68753/does-each-server-behind-a-load-balancer-need-their-own-ssl-certificate
If you do your load balancing on the TCP or IP layer (OSI layer 4/3,
a.k.a L4, L3), then yes, all HTTP servers will need to have the SSL
certificate installed.
If you load balance on the HTTPS layer (L7), then you'd commonly
install the certificate on the load balancer alone, and use plain
un-encrypted HTTP over the local network between the load balancer and
the webservers (for best performance on the web servers).
So you should install your SSL certificate to your Heroku endpoint and let Heroku handle the rest.
Question is, how does a client go about getting an SSL'ed connection;
do I need to get a multidomain cert and start adding domains to it as
I get clients, am i supposed to install their cert onto Heroku (I
believe I can only install 1 so thats a no go) or is it supposed to
live on Cloudflare somewhere?
If you're referring to adding servers to your service from heroku, all you need to do is increase the number of web-dynos. Heroku will handle the load balancing in between these dynos. Your SSL certificate should be resolved in the load balancer so your dynos will be serving requests for the same endpoint. You shouldn't need another SSL certificate for the endpoint you've defined - as long as you're serving traffic from multiple dynos attached to it.
I have a digitalocean One-Click Ubuntu Wordpress Droplet with a NameCheap domain.
I've never done anything with SSL before so I followed a tutorial (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-ssl-certificate-on-apache-for-ubuntu-14-04). Once I made it to the end with no issues, I realized that it was a self-signed certificate and didn't remove the warning that browsers were giving and that I had to purchase one from a provider. Since my domain is through NameCheap, I went through them (Comodo?) and followed their linked tutorial for the setup (https://brettdewoody.com/how-to-setup-ssl-certs-with-digitalocean-and-comodo/).
I made it through that and browsers were bringing up an error saying that it was a self-signed certificate and it could be a problem. I went back through both tutorials and checked my stuff and tried to remove what I could of the original part. After blindly finagling things for a few hours, my site receives an A+ from this ssl checker (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=vc2online.com) but browsers refuse to connect to the site (vc2online.com).
I don't even know where I need to start to get this to working properly.
Currently your issue is that you have 301 redirect from vc2online.com to www.vc2online.com but unfortunately your ssl certificate is only for vc2online.com, not www.vc2online.com.
You enabled HSTS so going backward won't be easy.
The quickest way to solve it is by using let's encrypt instead the comodo certificate.
You can use certbot to fully automate the process. You will find out it is much easier (and cheaper) than comodo paid certificate
P.S. I think this question should be asked in super user / server fault.
I want to connect a custom domain to an app built on Heroku. Can someone confirm that I actually need to buy a certificate and in addition buy the SSL addon on Heroku?
Do I need both or is one of them enough? What is the point of the addon?
/Knut
If you are already using paid dynos (e.g. Hobby dynos) then you can save some costs by using Heroku SSL for free in your app, instead of paying for the SSL Endpoint add on.
This is assuming your app doesn't need to support really old browsers (see Minimum supported browser versions.
These add ons basically provide the protocol support your app needs for SSL with your private domain.
However, regardless of which of the above 2 you choose, you will still need to acquire in addition an SSL certificate. There are all kinds of different offerings for the actual certificate, including free certificates e.g. from Let's Encrypt.
See here for instructions on using a free Let's Encrypt certificate on Heroku with Heroku SSL.
Bottom line: If you are already using paid dynos, it should be possible for you to add full SSL support for your custom Heroku domain for free.
If however you find the above too bewildering, you might want to pay a few bucks for a service such as Expedited SSL, which gives you a certificate (for a monthly fee) and takes care of the whole issue of installing it and keeping it updated on Heroku.
Heroku has made it even easier to use SSL for custom domains now assuming you're not on the free tier plan (if you pay for at least one dyno you're good to go).
https://blog.heroku.com/announcing-automated-certificate-management
Basically, once you have a paid plan for your app., Heroku will generate the certs for you and any custom domains you have added. Then you need to check that you have the right forwarding setup by your domain provider etc.
To add ssl to an existing app you can run:
$ heroku certs:auto:enable -a <app name>
Then run the following command and make sure your custom domains are returned:
$heroku domains
I got a little site build with harpjs and host on surge.sh. They provide free basic ssl for their exemple.surge.sh domain but it cost 13$/month to be able to add ssl to custom domain.. I was wondering if anyone have a free solution for me. I've tried certbot, but nothing concluent.. Dunno what's wrong. (error)
An unexpected error occurred:
DialogError
Please see the logfiles in /var/log/letsencrypt for more details.
Let me clear many things about SSL.
First, now are called TLS. SSL is deprecated.
Second, yes you can get free TLS. You can even generate your own TLS, however it's not the best path.
Letsencypt is a TLS as a service, free of charge.
Third, AWS offers free TLS, just get an ELB or a Cloudfront.
Here are some options:
I think this hosting service you use is very expensive. You can host a static or dynamic site on AWS (using S3+CF or EC2+CF, respectively), with free TLS, free of charge for the first 12 months (free tier). After free tier period, the price is per usage. On AWS, setting up a TLS is very easy, easier than letsencrypt, and easier and cheaper than you emitting yor own TLS.
Another option, keep your current host but put a CDN in front of it, AWS offers Cloudfront with frre TLS at reasonable cost (for CF service). Also Cloudflare offers a very good CDN with TLS capabilities, IPv6 and a free plan.
If you go for Let´s Encrypt, be sure your hosting service allows you to upload the certificates.
I have a production instance on Heroku where users go to https://secure.myapp.com for checkout. I used hostname-based SSL because $100 / month just isn't feasible for my client.
Now, I'm in a situation where I need a staging environment (http://myapp-staging.herokuapp.com) and the SSL / subdomain stuff just doesn't work ("secure" replaces "myapp-staging") when going to the checkout, and the SSL cert I purchased won't work since it's keyed to myapp.com.
Can anyone please advise on what the most affordable setup is given this situation?
Thank you!
If need to replicate your production environment that closely then your only option is to setup and pay for the same SSL that you have in production.
An alternative might be to configure your application so that it's not reliant on 'secure.' and use the piggyback SSL addon.