I have an application on Heroku that currently does not use ACM.
Our customers provide us a domain, point their DNS to the provided CNAME, and then provide us a SSL certificate to upload manually.
We would like to cut out the SSL portion as it's a huge burden for people. It appears Heroku ACM can take care of this for us.
My concern is with existing domains / certificates.
What will happen to them if I enable ACM?
I'd imagine they get taken care of with a tiny bit of downtime, but don't want to get into a spot where we've broke their domain and no longer have the certificates they provided us.
I work for advertising seo company. They have dedicated server and want also use SSL for the clients. They asked me to find the best option regarding that, I need help from you guys. I suppose some of you are more experienced in this.
Should they buy certificates separately for each client?
Create self signed certificate (Is there any way avoid security warnings).
Use wild card or multiple domain SSL
Other option (please suggest)
Thanks
I would recommand using LetsEncrypt.
It is free, you can do wildcard, automatic renewal every 3 month, documentation, etc.
I'm a big fan of it.
You can also use your registrar, sometimes they also sell certificates for the domain they sell. Like Gandi for example, you got 1 year free certificate with a domain, and they guide you all along on how to install it.
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?
I am new to Cpanel and using CloudLinux 7.4.
When adding a new site to Cpanel a Lets encrypt SSL is created in the background which is great, however, I have an issue creating a site where the A records are not pointed to the server at the time of creating the site (for instance, I am setting up a site that is on another server and will point to the Linux server once ready).
The SSL is created but marked as self-signed which is logical since the IP can't be verified. How can I force the SSL to update after I have pointed the A records to the Linux server?
I am working on a large site currently using an SSL, I would like to avoid as much down-time as possible when transferring over.
(Posted on behalf of the question author).
After much search I have ended finding out how to sort the above. Firstly, I was wrong about the type of SSL, it is not Let's Encrypt but Comodo but I don't think this makes any difference.
On my server the auto SSL is set to run at 3 am but if the change is urgent: go to WHM >> manage autoSSL. Under the manage users tab there is a blue bottom on the left of the user called check “username”. This sends the user back in the queue, in total in took a couple of minutes to update and the SSL is now fine.
I was originally looking at Cpanel site login and not WHM, little info on the subject on the web.
Recommended you to enable auto renew once the SSL expire, its will help you to keep the SSL active for your website.
To begin with, I already posted the same question in serverfault.com and received no help, so I'm repeating it here out of desperation.
Recently PayPal is requiring servers to support SHA-256. Here's an article referring to this issue:
https://www.paypal-knowledge.com/infocenter/index?page=content&id=FAQ1766&expand=true&locale=en_US
At the top of the article, it states,
Update your integration to support certificates using the SHA-256 algorithm. PayPal is upgrading SSL certificates on all Live and Sandbox endpoints from SHA-1 to the stronger and more robust SHA-256 algorithm.
We have a dedicated CentOS server with numerous sites, mostly WordPress. Quite a few use PayPal IPN but do not have dedicated IPs or SSL Certificates. What needs to be changed to the server so these sites will support SHA-256? Our server is situated with Limestone Networks so I've created a ticket and asked repeatedly for assistance to no avail. They keep repeating SSL's need to be updated on the server. Would that be a wildcase SSL certificate in the usage case I described? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Based on your comments, it sounds like this is nothing to do with SHA256, but a simple CN mismatch. A certificate is only good for the names listed in it. You could try adding a subjectAltName for each of the required hosts, or a wildcard certificate for *.example.com (though I wouldn't trust one of those for my server.)