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Setting up HTTP/2 for Nginx

In Racing Trim

Article from ADMIN 62/2021

By Oliver Gutperl

HTTP/2, the current representative of the HTTP family, offers several advantages for website operators and their users if the protocol is correctly adapted to the individual scenario.

Since its beginnings, the World Wide Web has primarily been based on two technologies: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTML is by far the better known technology and the one with the more turbulent past. In addition to questionable technological overkill (e.g., the <blink> tag), conflicts between implementers have been a constant sideshow to the language's evolution. Some further developments such as XHTML have proved to be a technological dead end, causing considerable additional work in quite a few projects.

HTTP/2 at a Glance

Compared with HTML, however, the further development of HTTP has taken place rather covertly and has not been determined by political motives or marketing measures to any great extent. As it has become clear that many websites need to be available 24/7 and that failures could quickly become very expensive – not just in the e-commerce sector – the focus has shifted to solid technology and extensive compatibility. Innovations are therefore slow to catch on and have undergone intensive testing.

Today, only about half of all websites support HTTP/2 [1], even though it was standardized in RFC 7540 [2] back in May 2015. In the case of the Nginx web server, the ngx_http_v2_module module replaced its predecessor ngx_http_spdy_module in September 2015 (Nginx 1.9.5). April 2016 saw the module enter the stable branch (Nginx 1.10.0) [3]. By the way, the development of the Nginx module was financed by Dropbox and Automattic (WordPress).

The big websites in particular were early adopters of HTTP/2, preferring it over HTTP/1.1. For them, features like superior compression or request multiplexing were attractive

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