--- title: SSL for Custom Subdomains with Cloudflare, Heroku, and Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 24 slug: ssl-for-custom-subdomains-with-cloudflare-heroku-and-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-24 published_at: 2022-09-30 10:20:06 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:05 +0000 summary: description: Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/ Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev #rubyonrails #ruby #rails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial] views: 2338 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/ssl-for-custom-subdomains-with-cloudflare-heroku-and-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-24 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6Z9SXqoF0 youtube_id: 8c6Z9SXqoF0 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/8c6Z9SXqoF0 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8c6Z9SXqoF0/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # SSL for Custom Subdomains with Cloudflare, Heroku, and Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 24 *Published: September 30, 2022* *Views: 2338* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6Z9SXqoF0) [![SSL for Custom Subdomains with Cloudflare, Heroku, and Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 24](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8c6Z9SXqoF0/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6Z9SXqoF0) ## Description Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/ Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev #rubyonrails #ruby #rails ## Transcript hey what's up how's it going welcome back in this episode you're going to see how to set up a cloudflare domain then we're also going to use cloudflare to terminate ssl for our custom subdomain so we're going to set up a wildcard domain on cloudflare and then we're going to use that wildcard domain on heroku so that we can set up these this subdomain routing and it's all going to work with https and ssl and it's going to be a full end-to-end encrypted situation so stick around and we're going to go through all of the steps to go from having no domain to having a full working cloudflare setup with heroku and custom domains all right here we go we're going to log into cloudflare and then head over to domain registration and i wanted to find a domain that worked well for a creator platform so super creatively i wrote creator platform as the domain name uh and then we found one down here that's pretty affordable uh for 8.74 so let's just buy that so we're going to um i'm going to blur this out this is like entering my personal information as we fill out this form uh but it's just you know your normal name email phone number date of birth blood type social security number no it's just the basics for for billing and also for domain registration if you've set up a domain anywhere else you'll be familiar with this now the thing that i thought was interesting about cloudflare versus google domains is that cloudflare has this cname flattened feature which was pretty cool and it enabled us to do a lot so um yeah that's what we went with cloudflare now this card input field we're just gonna take a little sidebar because i was like oh wow this is cool cloudflare is actually using uh the new stripe payment element so how did we know that well we can just crack it open with inspect here and look at some of these class names and we can tell based on uh these these class names but also the fact that it's inside of this uh yeah this hidden internal document that's using payment elements so very cool and uh happy to safely and securely enter my actual credit card number there and again yeah blurring it out just so that we don't get you know things taken all right we're going to complete our purchase here at the bottom that takes just a second and we've got a new domain again i'm going to blur out some of the registration information or whatever but here we go let's head over and take a look at the domain that was just created for us on cloudflare so the next step is we want to go over to dns and set up our dns registrations for all of the records that we're going to need so we'll need several c names so i always start with a c name for www so we're going to drop in www that's going to give us a c name that we can use and point to on heroku now using the heroku cli we can say heroku domains colon add and drop that in you can also do this from the heroku dashboard but this is the way that i've always done it and this is kind of like the way that i'm familiar with so this is just the approach that i took we copy that target that heroku gave us and paste that into the target field on cloudflare if you want to you can check out the details about the this registration record and if we were to take that domain and head over to the browser there's always a little bit of a delay when you are working with domains so the browser just shows empty for now if we run heroku domains we'll see the list of domains that are set up and if we were to type heroku open this is going to open the default window for where our heroku app is running so right now this is giving us sort of the raw entry point for creator-platform.herocoap.com but we wanted it to use our actual domain so let's see if let's add another record this is going to be for the apex domain so the apex is just the domain by itself with no subdomain so creatorplatform.xyz and we can add apex domains directly to heroku the same way that we added our first www domain again that gives us a target that we need to point to so we're going to drop that in the target and i think it's kind of funny where it says target required because it makes me think target acquired all right so we've got two c names this one is saying that because apex records don't support cnames there's some cname flattening thing i don't actually know the details of this i just know that it allows you to use this top level apex domain without having to do anything fancy with regard to forwarding now if we were to do an ns lookup on our domain the first one that we set up we're still in a waiting period so we're not actually getting any responses back because nothing has propagated yet for that first www subdomain finally we're going to add a record for a wild card domain so this time we need to use the asterisk or the star and we're also going to register that the same way with heroku domain so we're going to say heroku domains colon add and because i'm in zsh i had to wrap this in quotes so we're going to do star.creatorplatform.xyz again we get a target we copy our target bring it back over to cloudflare drop that in there and click on save so now we have three cname records and we are looking good but if we head over to creator platform.xyz we're still seeing this error it says ssl version or cipher mismatch and if you look at the details of this it just shows that the connection to the site is not secure but if we went in curl dash i you'll see also that we are being redirected to https and if we take the https version and do curl dash i again we're still seeing this handshake failure and so this took me a while to debug this is these are a couple commands that will help you flush dns if you need to but by the time i had flushed dns i actually took a lunch and then came back and flushed dns and then looked that up again and it looks like the domain has propagated so at this point we now actually have the domain and that is routing us and returning the content that is hosted on heroku so that is looking good everything seems fine right um yeah everything seems fine but if i try to go and register i put in my email address and my password now and click on sign in and i get this error this 422 http response from rails and i'm like okay well that means unprocessable entity let's go look at the the server logs to see what's going on so we can run heroku logs t that opens up the server logs and i find this line in the server logs that says action controller invalid authenticity token so as part of csrf checking where rails is going to look and see if the base url matches the the origin header and in this case what's happening is cloudflare is talking to the browser with https but then when cloudflare passes the request along to rails it's just using http under the hood that's because we're using that flexible setting inside of inside of cloudflare so in order to fix this we have to go to ssl and create a new origin certificate so the hostnames here are listed out the cool thing about this origin certificate is it allows the wildcard domain so we can create this certificate and what we're going to do is take the cert and enter it into heroku so that we can then encrypt the traffic that's going directly between cloudflare and heroku so we'll have sort of end to end encryption happening and instead of clodflair making http requests without ssl to heroku now cloudflare will reach out to heroku using ssl so we're going to go into our heroku dashboard now in order to set up ssl certs we needed to change the dyno type to be hobby dinos i probably just needed to do this for the web dyno but i also wanted to enable the worker so i'm going to go down to you go to settings and go down to ssl certificates click on create certificate give it a name i called mine cloudflare origin server from cloudflare we're going to copy the origin certificate that's our public key or our public certificate and then we're going to copy our private key that's our private certificate and paste those in and once we have that set up we're going to select all the domains sure click on next all right the ssl certificate is now set up very cool go back over to the application give us some space in the logs try again to register and we have the same error so the final piece of the puzzle here is that after we set up the origin certificate we need to go to ssl tls go back over to the ssl tls settings and we need to enable full encryption mode i hadn't i did not try full strict but i believe that might also work because we did set up a cloudflare origin ca certificate on the server but um so yeah if you want you can go ahead and try out full strict but i ended up just using full and it worked just fine so now we head back over to the application enter in our details and sign in and that request looks great that is actually looking pretty good so now we see signed in successfully awesome super super exciting so after i was able to sign in successfully i did go through the entire onboarding flow and i went and created my stripe account we're gonna do that in another episode we'll look at kind of going through that onboarding again i didn't want to bore you with that because it was sort of unrelated to setting up the domain so here i am creating a store i'm setting my subdomain to test picking a couple different colors and once i save this and redirect over to this store detail page you'll see this url now this is sort of the moment of truth so let's open this up boom okay fantastic we can click on the lock we can see the connection is secure and the certificate is valid that's because it is validated with that wildcard domain certificate so that is awesome we're super excited and we can now go through the whole checkout flow so that is it that wraps up the episode we are now able to use this custom subdomain routing again we need to go back and add some controls so that not anyone can just add like www as a new store subdomain that would be bad we probably want to also like reserve a few different names like admin or dashboard or account or you know just a few that we wouldn't want people to use but otherwise i think this is looking really good i'm super happy about it thanks so much for watching and we'll see you the next one [Music] 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