How to Enable HTTP/2 on NGINX?

The experimental support for HTTP/2 became available in Nginx since the mainline version 1.9.5 and with the help of SSL it is really easy to enable it, I’ll show you how enable HTTP/2 on Nginx.

Related: Install and Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu

If you’re already running SPDY on your web server already, please note that the SPDY module have been replaced with the HTTP/2 module in Nginx. Fortunately, to run HTTP/2 you just need to upgrade to Nginx 1.9.5 or later and replace spdy with http2 on your listen directive line.

First check whether Nginx is compiled with HTTP/2 or not.

nginx -V

Make sure you can find --with-http_v2_module somewhere in that output. If you are not seeing this then you need to upgrade Nginx to latest version.

Now we just need to just a single word to your Nginx config.

Open the server block config for your HTTPS site (all implementations of HTTP/2 require HTTPS), and change this line:

listen 443 ssl;

to

listen 443 ssl http2;

now real your configuration so Nginx apply these settings.

service nginx reload

Now you have successfuly enabled HTTP/2 on Nginx, all you need to do is now test your app’s or website’s speed and performance.