heroku: set SSL certificates on Free Plan?

Question

I would like to set some SSL certificates for one app I have on heroku (a simple application based on nodeJS + Vue).

I know if I upgrade to the Hobby Plan (7$ for month) I can have it automatically.

But for now it would too much money for a test application, so I am wondering if I can achieve some similar goal also with a Free Plan.

so: Is it possible to set SSL certificate for an app on Heroku JUST with the Free Plan? Maybe in a complicated/tricky way via CLI?

From the Heroku pages and documentation it looks not possible. But I have to ask :)

Answer 1

One way around this could be setting up a proxy server on a host you can set SSL certificates on and then simply forward requests to the free herokudns domain using encryption as well.

You'd have to have a separate server with something like nginx or httpd running.. I am not sure of a free service to host the proxy, but usually when you sign up for a domain you may get a hosting addon with it, or perhaps people already have acess to an encrypted host and just want to also use Heroku for their node applications.

Setting up a httpd proxy would look somewhat like this (from https://serverfault.com/questions/84821/apache-proxypass-with-ssl):

<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>
ServerName customdomain.com
SSLProxyEngine On
SSLProxyCheckPeerCN on
SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire on
ProxyPass / https://heroku-app-name.herokuapp.com
ProxyPassReverse / https://heroku-app-name.herokuapp.com
</VirtualHost>

This way you have full encryption all the way :)

Answer 2

I had this issue also. I wanted to set up a custom domain for my free account on Heroku for my React App. I searched so much info on the web and read loads of documents from Heroku support.

The conclusion is that on the Heroku free account, a custom domain name with SSL certificate cannot be setup. If you need SSL with your custom domain name, you need to upgrade to any of their paid hosting accounts.

Heroku does provide SSL certificate for their free account as long as it is not using a custom domain name. So the standard free account URL will be something like this "https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com"

NB. Google Firebase allows free hosting and Custom Domain name with SSL, for up to a certain amount of traffic before charging. For testing an app, this will be a perfect alternative. I am using it. And it was easy to set up my custom domain.

I hope this saves you hours of searching.