I thought I might share my recent experience with enabling SSL to one of our AwareIM apps given that it is so simple and it costs a fraction of what a normal setup for SSL does.
As part of our normal setup for hosted applications we use a service provided by Cloudflare which assists with reducing the latency experienced by users in different geo locations , and also controls the DNS settings of our domain.
While watching the SSL presentation from the Bali event I had a thought, and realised that the SSL service provided by CloudFlare works great with all my existing websites and other apps and perhaps it is worth investigating if it would work with AwareIM especially given that the cost per domain is only $5USD per month.
So I did and to my pleasant surprise it works really well, it passes all tests and it takes less than 5 minutes to setup. Below is a step by step tutorial on how I did this:
1. The screenshot below shows the typical dashboard for a domain in Cloudflare. Notice that the SSL option is set to Flexible.
2. Here you can see how to setup the DNS settings for your subdomain/s where your AwareIM instances reside. The other major possible advantage is the fact that if you have multiple instances of AwareIM running on multiple subdomains the same subscription for your main domain will work for all subdomains SSL.
3. In my case to provide proper functionality I needed to create page rules within CloudFlare which controls how they cache things etc. The screenshot below shows that I chose not to cache any AwareIM generated PDF docs with one rule and other settings which you can see in the next step in another rule.
4. This is the detail setup for the second rule which enables basic caching and turns off some features that can interfere with AwareIM
5.After the setup is completed I've ran a SSL check to see the results
6.Finally you can see the actual app with a valid SSL connection
