Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to Latest Nginx to Support HTTP2

Most webmaster and sysadmins has upgraded their setup to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS now. But Not all has upgraded, some of them wants HTTP/2 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Here Are Steps For Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to Latest Nginx to Support HTTP2 With Troubleshooting Error. Removal of current Nginx not needed.. Nginx Has No Support For this Upgrade. This is not recommended, we can not give whether HTTP/2 will work or not. But this upgrade is on live website without any downtime and avoid white page error while forcing upgrade. We are forcing the upgrade, it is not normal upgrade.

Steps Before Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to Latest Nginx to Support HTTP2 : Changes on Config Files

You must take backup of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default or /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ directory (depends on how many vHosts you have, name of the files). You can copy-paste the files as secret gist on GitHub gist for easy work. First, you need some changes on /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default. Normally we use something like –

You need to change include fastcgi_params to include fastcgi.conf, change listen 443 ssl spy default to listen 443 ssl http2 default_server, remove any SPDY related directives like add header for NPN, SPDY compression etc. HTTP/2 has a big blacklist of old and insecure ciphers, so we must avoid them. You should have –

Do the changes and save that file.

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf needs uncomments these directives –

Make sure that limit_req_zone looks like this –

Also, change the fastcgi cache path. Save the files.

Steps Before Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to Latest Nginx to Support HTTP2 : Changes on Repository Information

cd to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and do ls to see if any nginx.list present. If present simply delete with rm command. Now edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to add :

Save it. Thereafter wget wget nginx_signing.key as written here –

So, you’ll run :

You’ll get OK response. Run –

There will be no change on version of Nginx.

Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to Latest Nginx to Support HTTP2

Above steps deliberately done as we switching to Nginx’s repo. Now run –

You’ll get a whooping big response :

You will get prompts like :

After all completed run :

Then replace /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default with our modified files as written in under Changes on Config Files subheader. Run nginx -t and reboot the server on successful output. After making sure that your website is running, run nginx -V and nginx -v to check the output. You should have ngx_http_v2_module and version will be like nginx/1.11.3 or above.

Now, test with some browser tool or third part web based tool. Browse your website’s non-cached pages to make sure that visitors are not getting white pages.

You Broken My Server. Give My Old Ngix Back!

Do the opposite changes on Repository Information, remove PPAs by deleting the .list files from /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory and two lines we which we added to /etc/apt/sources.list file. Also run :

This won’t uninstall packages but the official repositories. You will fully remove the nginx, reboot, then run normal command to install nginx-extras, use the backup of backup of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default. It is difficult because the repo of Official Ubuntu and Nginx are different. apt-get downgrade does not exist but near similar way actually exists.