Disable SSL for Heroku App (django)

Question

We've decided not to use SSL anymore and unfortunately our server guy has quit and now I need to fix this. I've revoked the certs from Comodo, removed the SSL app from Heroku but that was apparently not enough and now we have serious problems with our site.

When visiting inteokej.nu one gets redirected to the app, but automatically http turns to https and instead of showing the domain (inteokej.nu) the app link is shown https://inteokej.herokuapp.com (I want inteokej.nu to be shown, not the actual app link).

That is a problem but not the biggest problem, which is that it's not possible to use the site anymore (eg login, the static pages works though). When I try to login I first get a https security error and when I proceed I get to the following page: https://www.inteokej.nu/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi ("Sorry! If you are the owner of this website, please contact your hosting provider: webmaster@inteokej.nu").

I've now learned the hard way that SSL is a complex thing but I really need to get this site up again as soon as possible. So, where should I start and how could I proceed from this point? I guess there's some back end coding that should be done in the django code as well?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

Your issue doesn't seem to be with SSL but DNS or at least however your server guy set things up.

The error page you're seeing isn't a Heroku error, inteokej.nu isn't being hosted on Heroku but on a server run by your DNS provider svenskadomaner.se .

If you use the Firefox Live HTTP Headers plugin you can follow the request/response cycle and you'll see that there is a 301 redirect from www.inteokej.nu to inteokej.herokuapp.com (probably an .htaccess redirect).

Check the DNS records for your domain (like here http://viewdns.info/dnsrecord/?domain=inteokej.nu ) you'll see that there is no CNAME record to Heroku, only an A Record to 46.22.116.5 which is an IP Address owned by svenskadomaner.se.

So the thing to do is to set up the custom domain as recommended on Heroku's site:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains

and set the CNAME to Heroku's recommendation.

One reason your server guy might have set things up like they did is that Heroku doesn't easily allow "naked domains", so people often do .htaccess redirects from example.com to www.example (which does work easily with CNAMEs).

Good luck!