How to do it...

Based on our previous example, we only need to make one key change. Instead of just specifying ssl as the listening protocol, we add http2:

server { 
    listen              443 ssl http2; 
    server_name         http2.nginxcookbook.com; 
    ssl_certificate     /etc/ssl/public.pem; 
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private.key; 
    ssl_protocols       TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; 
    ssl_ciphers         HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5; 
 
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/ssl-access.log  combined; 
 
    location  /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; } 
    root  /var/www; 
} 

No changes to protocols or ciphers are necessary. To verify that HTTP/2 is working, you can use Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools) to show the protocol, or an external tool, such as the one KeyCDN provides:

Source: https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test

While a simple page won't show the performance difference, with the average page demand of around 50–70 requests we should see about 20 percent improvement. For more complex sites (for example, e-commerce sites) where there are more than 200 requests, the difference is even more dramatic.