Question

Google App Engine doesn’t support SSL for custom domains. Does this mean that it’s impossible to host a web2py application on GAE with a custom domain and still be able to use web2py authentication?

Answer 1

You still can use it, but it just won’t be as secure as it should. Of course you could limit yourself to the appspot.com subdomain and have HTTPS there, but that’s rather impractical.

GAE team has had the SSL for custom domain on the roadmap now for several years and there is even a closed beta running, but good luck getting into it.

People have cooked up two ways to get around this limitation:

1. Use a reverse proxy with SSL: here’s a good write up on this.
2. Use CloudFlare for SSL (similar to reverse proxy, but CloudFlare is doing the heavy lifting): here’s the write up.