Learning HTTP/2

Chapter 2. HTTP/2 Quick Start

When faced with something new and shiny, rarely do we want to spend the first hours meticulously going through the manual, reading the instructions, maintenance details, and safety advisories. We want to tear it out of the packaging, plug it in, turn it on, and start experiencing the wonders promised on the box. HTTP/2 (h2) should be no different.

So let’s start tinkering.

Up and Running

Realistically, you have likely been experiencing HTTP/2 on a daily basis. Open a modern browser (e.g., Edge, Safari, Firefox, Chrome) and point it at a major website like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and voila! you are using h2. Truth be told, this is likely anticlimactic and not the reason you are holding this book in your hands. Let’s get things up and running so that you can be running the next major website over h2.

There are two major steps to getting an h2 server up and running:

• Get and install a web server that speaks h2

• Get and install a TLS certificate so the browser will speak h2 with the server

Neither of these are trivial, but we are going to try to make it as simple as possible. There is a more exhaustive treatment of the subject in “Servers, Proxies, and Caches”, but hopefully you will be running an h2 server by the end of this chapter.

Get a Certificate

Working with certificates is a subject that merits a book of its own. We are going to skip right through all of the theory and get a certificate in your hands for experimentation purposes ...