How to get already installed NGINX to use OpenSSL 1.0.2 for ALPN?

May 14, 2016 261.4k views
Security Nginx Ubuntu 16.04 LEMP
jvdcme
By:
jvdcme

Hello,

I would like to use HTTP/2 and to fully use its capabilities, it needs ALPN (and not NPN). ALPN is bundled in OpenSSL 1.0.2, but NGINX doesn’t seem to use it. I have upgraded everything and currently I am at NGINX 1.10.0 and OpenSSL 1.0.2h.

http://i.imgur.com/khtNxxy.png

As you can see in the screenshot above, OpenSSL 1.0.2h is indeed installed on the server as is the latest version of NGINX 1.10.0. OpenSSL was already at 1.0.2h when I upgraded from NGINX 1.9 to 1.10.

Any help to get NGINX to use OpenSSL 1.0.2 or how I can enable ALPN would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

PS I have no clue on how I could recompile NGINX. I’ve always simply used apt-get install nginx.

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5 Answers
mrbdmm May 24, 2016

  1. rebuiding openssl

    $ wget -c https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.2h.tar.gz
$ tar xf openssl-1.0.2h.tar.gz -C /usr/local/
$ cd /usr/local/openssl-1.0.2h
$ ./config
$ make depend
$ make
$ make test
$ make install
$ mv /usr/bin/openssl /usr/bin/openssl_1.0.1e
$ ln -s /usr/local/ssl/bin/openssl /usr/bin/openssl
$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.0.2h  3 May 2016

  2. rebuild nginx 

    $ yum -y install pcre-devel
$ tar xf nginx-1.8.1.tar.gz
$ cd nginx-1.8.1
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nginx \
--with-http_ssl_module --with-openssl=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2h/ 
...
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  • mrbdmm May 24, 2016 
    [root@c600 ~]# nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.10.0
built by gcc 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-16) (GCC) 
built with OpenSSL 1.0.2h  3 May 2016
TLS SNI support enabled
...
AJMaxwell May 27, 2016

I took what mrbdmm wrote, and made it into a script to install Nginx, OpenSSL, and ngx_pagespeed from source: https://gist.github.com/AJMaxwell/f6793605068813aae888216b02364d85

I hope it’s as useful to you as it is for me

Reply
tzumby January 21, 2017

Thanks a lot for the this guys, it was super useful! Note that in Ubuntu 16.04 I had to add a few more dependencies to make the script work:

  • libgeoip-dev
  • libgd2-xpm-dev
  • libperl-dev

This was on a fresh install.

I took the steps and created an Ansible-galaxy role if anyone is interested in further automating this. I added credits for you guys with links to this thread and the bash script - let me know if you would like me to include anything else in there.

https://github.com/tzumby/nginx-http2

In the future I plan to add a Let’s encrypt role to go along with this.

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tzumby January 21, 2017
[deleted]
Reply
Dmi3v January 27, 2018

My way to have http2 + alpn on https://glavpooltorg.su:
Add jessie-backports repository

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

Install openssl with apt-get

apt-get -t jessie-backports install openssl

and then rebuild nginx from source “as is”.

Yeah! glavpooltorg.su supports HTTP/2.0.
ALPN supported.
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