Namecheap domain won't redirect without "www"

Question

I'm looking to connect my domain to a heroku app. So far, the tutorials I've read say we want Namecheap to have the following records for domain example.com:

CNAME Record    www    www.example.com.herokudns.com
URL Redirect    @      https://www.example.com

With this config, I can successfully get to my homepage using:

• http://example.com/
• http://www.example.com/
• https://www.example.com/

But for some reason https://example.com/ won't connect and times out. Does anyone know if there's a way to get both https://example.com/ and https://www.example.com/ to redirect successfully?

Answer 1

You won't be able to do this with DNS provided redirects.

The reason is that at the point of redirect, ie your DNS provider they would need to:

1. Accept https/443 requests to their redirector
2. have a valid certificate for hacksofcharity.com

if they don't you'll either receive a timeout, or a certificate mismatch in your browser. When apex domains are involved with https then your only option is to be using a DNS provider that supports using CNAME - see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains#add-a-custom-root-domain and perform any redirects within your application code base.