How do I configure a naked domain name to work using Heroku's SSL endpoint?

Question

I recently added SSL functionality to my Rails app running on Heroku. I successfully purchased and created a certificate for my domain and using a CNAME in GoDaddy, the WWW subdomain of my app works correctly when a user browses to www.myappname.com

The page loads without any warnings and the certificate works as is supposed to.

The CNAME looks something like this: host: www points to: myappnamefoobar-1234.herokussl.com

However when I simply go to the "naked" domain name - myappname.com, a certificate error comes up.

How do I configure the DNS settings in GoDaddy to make this work?

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked-domains-dns-arecords

There is a whole article in Heroku's docs about naked domains but I don't see how this would apply to GoDaddy's DNS manager.

I know that Heroku has some sort of IP based SSL that costs $100/month but is there another way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible. Heroku strongly discourage IP based domains these days, the IP based SSL addon is deprecated now but the SSL endpoint doesn't work with IP so it would seem that they are moving away from supporting it.

The simple option is to have a redirect from the naked domain to the www. domain - but this would work on http:// but if a user tried to do it with https:// then it would probably show the certificate error message. It's not ideal but it works.