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++<<

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

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

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;
  }

}

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.