Enable SSL with custom domains on GitHub Pages via Cloudflare

Two weeks ago I decided (finally!) that I should enable SSL on this blog.

Problem: GitHub Pages with a custom domain

This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages with a custom domain, which currently doesn’t support SSL out of the box. If you stick with a github.io domain SSL is not a problem.

Cloudflare to the rescure

I decided to take a deeper look at Cloudflare, which provides DNS, CDN and other “network”-related services. For the “main” service Cloudflare serves as the DNS for your domain and is like a proxy.

With this setup you have some nice benefits:

A free SSL certificate (AFAIK you can also use your own cert if you need)
A CDN cache
DDOS protection
“Analytics”

Be aware: This is just the free plan.

And everything is pretty easy to manage via the web interface.

Setup

The first step is to register at Cloudflare & setup your domain. After the first step you need to change the name server for your domain to Cloudflares server.

All your domain belonging can now be managed inside Cloudflare:

Setting up some rules

When your DNS changes are done (which can take a couple of hours) you might want to introduce some basic rules. I use these settings, which enforces HTTPS and Cloudflare cache:

Done… or nearly done.

Now we have done the “Cloudflare-part”. The next step is to make sure that everything on your page uses HTTPS instead of HTTP to avoid “mixed content”-errors.

Some notes from my own “migration”:

If you have Google Analytics - make sure you change the property-settings to the HTTPS URL
If you use Disqus you need to migrate your comments from the HTTP url to the HTTPS URL. There is a migrate tool available, which uses a CSV file.

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