Troubleshooting Heroku shows different app error
You pointed your domain to Heroku, but when you access your domain from the browser you see a different application than the one you expected.
This error occurs when you point a domain on DNSimple to an Heroku application, but on Heroku an application is already set up to use that custom domain.
The error means that your DNS is correctly resolving to Heroku. Follow the instructions below to fix the error.
Diagnosing
Here is an example that should help you understand what’s going on:
You have two Heroku applications: green-turtle and red-turtle with their corresponding Heroku hostnames green-turtle.herokuapp.com and red-turtle.herokuapp.com.
You add the domain awesome-turtles.com in DNSimple and you point the CNAME www.awesome-turtles.com to green-turtle.herokuapp.com. However, in Heroku you associate the www.awesome-turtles.com custom domain to the application red-turtle.herokuapp.com.
What will happen is that when someone visits www.awesome-turtles.com, Heroku will route the request to the red-turtle app, and not green-turtle as you would expect given your DNS settings.
You can experience the same behaviour if the red-turtle application belongs to someone else which leaves us with two possible scenarios:
- The application with the custom domain setup is yours
- The application with the custom domain setup belongs to someone else
Heroku endpoints can be either myapp.herokuapp.com or example.com.herokudns.com. You should use example.com.herokudns.com if you are using Heroku SSL and myapp.herokuapp.com if not.
Solution
The application with the custom domain setup is yours
This is what is happening if you recognize the application displayed when you visit the domain. You probably set up the custom domain for a different application. Now you simply have to remove that setting on Heroku and add it back on the application for which you now want to use the domain.
The application with the custom domain setup belongs to someone else
In this case you will have to contact Heroku support and explain your situation. They will ask you to verify the ownership of the domain. Once you do they will be able to remove the existing custom domain configuration so you can add it to your domain.
The next step will be configuring your custom domain which you can do following the steps described in this support article.