How to connect a Heroku application to an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance, forcing SSL and certificate chain verification

connect-heroku-app-to-postgres-rds-with-ssl.md

1 - Download the RDS certificates (root plus region-specific intermediate ones) bundle:

wget -O config/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem

2 - Add config/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem to the repository and redeploy to Heroku.

3 - Update the DATABASE_URL env var:

'postgres://user:password@host/db_name?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=config/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem'

do not forget to surround with quotes

References:

• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.SSL.html
• https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/libpq-ssl.html#LIBPQ-SSL-PROTECTION

Note: For postgres set db_name as postgres for it to work while host is aws endpoint : port

Example: postgres://username:password@database_name.ceb4nertmwp.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:5432/postgres?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=config/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51014647/aws-postgres-db-does-not-exist-when-connecting-with-pg