NGINX Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. HTTP/2

8.0 Introduction

HTTP/2 is a major revision to the HTTP protocol. Much of the change to this revision is focused on the transport layer, such as enabling full request and response multiplexing over a single TCP connection. Efficiencies were gained through the use of compression on HTTP header fields, and support for request prioritization was added. Another large addition to the protocol was the ability for the server to push messages to the client. This chapter details the basic configuration for enabling HTTP/2 in NGINX as well as configuring Google’s open source remote procedure call (gRPC) and HTTP/2 server push support.

8.1 Basic Configuration

Problem

You want to take advantage of HTTP/2.

Solution

Turn on HTTP/2 on your NGINX server:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
 
    ssl_certificate    server.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key server.key;
    # ...
}

Discussion

To turn on HTTP/2, you simply need to add the http2 parameter to the listen directive. The catch, however, is that although the protocol does not require the connection to be wrapped in SSL/TLS, some implementations of HTTP/2 clients only support HTTP/2 over an encrypted connection. Another caveat is that the HTTP/2 specification has blocked a number of TLS 1.2 cipher suites, and therefore will fail the handshake. The ciphers NGINX uses by default are not on the blocklist. The Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation of TLS allows the application layer to negotiate which protocol should be used ...