Description
Recently, I set up CloudFlare with Heroku to make good use of its Universal SSL and essentially made Dasherize https the poor man's way.
My aim was to get the following working:
http://dasherize.comredirects tohttps://www.dasherize.comhttp://www.dasherize.comredirects tohttps://www.dasherize.comhttps://dasherize.comredirects tohttps://www.dasherize.comhttps://www.dasherize.comworks!
Here are the steps to get that working:
1) Sign up for a CloudFlare account
Go to https://www.cloudflare.com/.
2) Add a website to CloudFlare
3) Configure CNAME
After you have scanned your website, you will probably see an A entry and a CNAME entry.
Modify (and/or delete) the A and CNAME entries so that they become:
CNAME,dasherize.comto Heroku domain nameCNAME,wwwto Heroku domain name
It might look strange to have two CNAME going to the same Heroku domain, but CloudFlare supports CNAME Flattening so we are good.
4) Wait for DNS to propagate
At this point, we can wait for DNS to propagate and when it's done:
http://dasherize.comredirects tohttps://dasherize.comhttp://www.dasherize.comredirects tohttps://www.dasherize.com
And the DNS entries should look like so (with some information ommitted):
$ curl -I http://dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
Location: https://dasherize.com/
Via: 1.1 vegur
Server: cloudflare-nginx
$ curl -I http://www.dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
Location: https://www.dasherize.com/
Via: 1.1 vegur
Server: cloudflare-nginx
$ curl -I https://dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
...
Via: 1.1 vegur
$ curl -I https://www.dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
..
Via: 1.1 vegur
We are almost there, we are just left with redirecting http://dasherize.com to https://www.dasherize.com.
You might be thinking.. But why www? Everyone has different opinions.
5) Final Redirection
To redirect http://dasherize.com to https://www.dasherize.com, we need to include add a Page Rule that:
Forwards (301)
https://dasherize.com/*tohttps://www.dasherize.com
And with that, the DNS entries will look like:
$ curl -I http://dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
Location: https://dasherize.com/
Via: 1.1 vegur
Server: cloudflare-nginx
$ curl -I http://www.dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
Location: https://www.dasherize.com/
Via: 1.1 vegur
Server: cloudflare-nginx
$ curl -I https://dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Location: https://www.dasherize.com/
$ curl -I https://www.dasherize.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Via: 1.1 vegur
6) Full SSL
Finally, go to the Crypto page, and make sure that you have selected the Full option for your SSL. You can read more about the differences by clicking on Help below the select options.
With these 6 steps, you now have a SSL enabled site for $0, all thanks to CloudFlare's Full SSL option:
Since all Heroku apps comes free with https and that, quoting CloudFlare, "CloudFlare will not attempt to validate the certificate", hence it makes it easy for us to have the Dasherize site SSL-enabled.
Also, don't forget to set config.force_ssl = true in your Rails production.rb.
Thank you for reading.
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