hosting-ssl-domain-names.md

On Hosting, SSL, and Domain Names

Of course you want to publish your project to the world. Therefor in the Getting Started page you are immediately setup with a Heroku project for staging and production. However, this still runs on the Heroku domain (e.g. yourproject-staging.herokuapp.com). We want to change this to your own domain name and introduce SSL to the mix to ensure you are setup properly.

1. Use Cloudflare as DNS

1. Sign up for Getting Started -- accounts are free
2. Recommendation: enable MFA on your Cloudflare account!
3. Add your domain name to your Cloudflare account, follow the steps
4. Remove the DNS records that are not applicable / defaults
5. Add two CNAME records (note we use CNAME Flattening to redirect www to non www):
6. CNAME yourdomain.com yourapp.io.herokudns.com
7. CNAME www yourapp.com
8. On the Crypto tab, set SSL to 'Full'
9. On the Page Rules tab, add a new rule, with input http://*yourdomain.com/* and the setting 'Always Use HTTPS'

2. Configure your Heroku app

1. Login to Heroku (and while you are here, setup MFA!)
2. Select the production app of your project (e.g. yourproject-production)
3. Select 'Settings' and scroll down to 'Domains and certificates'
4. Click 'Add Domain' and add the domain name (without www) you used in the first step