GitHub supports (certain) custom domain names registered with a Domain Name Provider for SSL protection. GitHub recently announced on it’s blog that GitHub Pages now have support for HTTPS. I found that one of my personal projects with a custom domain name was not supported for SSL protection. This led me down a path of troubleshooting what I needed to do to enable this feature.

In GitHub you are required to have CNAME for your custom domain for SSL support. According to GitHub this should allow access to HTTPS however I did not have access to this inspite of using CNAME. After looking into this issue further I came across this article on custom domains. Again, it seemed like I had registered a apex domain correctly with the DNS provider. Just to double check I used the dig command with my custom domain as shown here which in my case showed that my DNS record did not point to GitHub’s server. Meaning, I had to go back to the DNS provider and check if it had been set up correctly. With some investigation here I discovered the nameserver was pointing to a custom DNS for security reasons (details of which cannot be mentioned here for security reasons). This is where things became a bit complicated so to ensure I did not break any of the security settings on the nameserver but to still achieve the result of using SSL - I redirected all requests with the “http” scheme to “https”. This was luckily done through a simple button on the nameserver’s web application in this case.

In conclusion what this mean’t was that I couldn’t change the settings on GitHub but I was able to use SSL support through another hosting nameserver. This has led me to do further research into how web hosting actually works and the automated CI/CD pipeline - which will be for another post in the future.