Add GoDaddy naked domain to Heroku app

Question

Heroku custom domains

I've setup two custom domains for my Heroku app.

example.com        example.com.herokudns.com
*.example.com      wildcard.example.com.herokudns.com

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Domain configuration

I configured my domain as follows:

1. I added a CNAME Record for * pointing to wildcard.example.com.herokudns.com.
   Works fine.

2. I forwarded my URL using GoDaddy's Domain Forwarding tool, because I can only specify IP addresses as A records.

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Problem

The domain forwarding points to example.com.herokudns.com. Unfortunately GoDaddy automatically prepends http://, so it actually does not open my app and instead shows a Heroku message:

There's nothing here, yet.

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Goal

Setting up my GoDaddy root domain to point to my Heroku app.

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Note: GoDaddy automatically added an A record for @ pointing to >>++FWD1++<<

Zaibatsu

Answer 1

Cloudflare does the job!

Finally, I achieved my goal of using my naked domain as host by choosing CloudFlare to handle my DNS configuration.

Resources:

• CloudFlare allows CNAME Records to be the naked domain
• How CNAME Flattening works

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Note: CloudFlare has a pretty good documentation and setup process, you just need to:

1. add your domain to CloudFlare
2. follow the CloudFlare setup guide
   • updating your nameservers (in my case GoDaddy) to point to CloudFlare

Zaibatsu

make sure that you have Heroku set to receive ssl on it's dashboard, then on CloudFlare set the sll to full instead of flexible – Carden

Answer 2

What did you set your DNS to forward to? I had this same problem, but solved this creating a Heroku DNS entry for www.myapp.com. Heroku creates a DNS target of www.myapp.com.herokudns.com.

Here is my setup:

• DNS forwarding to www.myapp.com
• DNS CName of www to www.myapp.com.herokudns.com
• Heroku DNS added www.myapp.com

Blubberhead

Tell me if I am wrong, but that way I have to use the subdomain www and that's what I try to circumvent :-) – Zaibatsu

This still has the problem that https://myapp doesn't redirect correctly – Hodometer

Answer 3

You can also achieve this by setting up a nginx server with docker in five minutes.

First follow the instruction on this link: https://pentacent.medium.com/nginx-and-lets-encrypt-with-docker-in-less-than-5-minutes-b4b8a60d3a71

Then add your nginx server ip to your A Record with host name @

In you nginx server you can use this code to redirect all traffic to your naked domain to www domain. Just replace all your-domain.com with your domain.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name your-domain.com;

  location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
    root /var/www/certbot;
  }

  location / {
      return 301 https://www.your-domain.com;
  }
}
server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name your-domain.com;

  include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/your-domain.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/your-domain.com/privkey.pem;


  location / {
      return 301 https://www.your-domain.com$request_uri;
  }

}

Epitasis

Answer 4

In Setup Heroku and GoDaddy? allegutta solves the issue by masking the heroku-app-name domain with the .com domain. Instead of slooob.com.herokudns.com, use your original heroku app url ([heroku-app].herokuapp.com) and it should work. Just worked for me.

Sleep

For me that does show the url [heroku-app].herokuapp.com in the browser address bar, if I redirect to http://[heroku-app].herokuapp.com. Is it possible to use slooob.com? – Zaibatsu

You mean when you enter sloob.com the user is redirected to the real app url? That shouldn't happen. – Sleep

I mean the redirection shouldn't happen. Is it still like that? If so, can you post a picture of your CNAME records? – Sleep

Ah, yea the point was that I want to prevent redirecting from slooob.com to www.slooob.com. I achieved this at the end by using CloudFlare's Alias Record. – Zaibatsu