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Activate HTTP/2 on web servers

Son of SPDY

Numerous implementations of the new HTTP/2 protocol have been published: After implementation in browsers, distributed web servers followed. In this article, I describe how you can activate HTTP/2 in Nginx and look at support in the Apache and H2O web servers.

At the end of September last year, the commercial Nginx Plus web server gained support for the HTTP/2 protocol [1]. A short time later, the code made its way into the freely available Nginx version 1.9.5. Nginx can function as, among other things, a proxy running HTTP/2 on the client side and communicating with back-end servers via HTTP 1.1, FastCGI, SCGI, and uWSGI.

The HTTP/2 implementation is financially supported by Dropbox and Automattic, the company behind WordPress. At the time this article was written, the latest Nginx version was 1.9.9, which had already removed a few of the bugs in the HTTP/2 implementation. Until now, the server push feature, in which a web server initiates the transfer of files the client will need, has not been implemented.

Installing Nginx

Nginx can be installed relatively easily. The developers offer repositories for many distributions that contain the stable version and a developer version of the web server [2]. To install Nginx 1.9.9 on Ubuntu, for instance, add the following line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ trusty nginx

This example uses the mainline repository, which contains the latest Nginx version necessary for HTTP/2 support. The following call downloads the signing key that the package manager uses to verify the package and adds it to local memory:

$ wget http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
$ sudo apt-key add nginx_signing.key

Now you have to update the

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