IPv6 connectivity issues with nginx

@roshanbaliga

When it comes to NGINX, enabling IPv6 should only require that you’re server block contain the lines shown below (I’ve intentionally cut the rest of the sever block out since the important thing is getting IPv6 working for you – the other lines don’t really matter).

server
{
    listen                          80 default_server;
    listen                          [::]:80 ipv6only=on;
}

or

server
{
    listen                          443 default_server;
    listen                          [::]:443 ipv6only=on;
}

The default_server setting isn’t required and simply tells NGINX that if a request for a domain is received and can not be routed, that it should be routed to this server block, i.e. the default server.

If this is a recently deployed Droplet, that should be the only configuration that you need. You should not have to modify any other configuration settings.

To test this, I just compiled NGINX on a dev droplet that I have setup and configured one of my test domains to point to the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and ran the same test you linked to and it worked instantly.

DNS

In terms of DNS, one thing that would prevent this from working is how you’ve setup DNS. Let’s use the following as examples (as that’s what you included in your OP).

IPv4 IP: 139.59.0.0 IPv6 IP: 2400:6180:100:WW::XXX:YYYY

Now let’s say your Droplet hostname is:

web.domain.com

and your domain is:

domain.com

And you want IPv4 + IPv6 to work on both, of course.

So you should have 2 A entries and 2 AAAA entries – i.e. one of each for both of the above.

For domain.com

A        domain.com        139.59.0.0
AAAA     domain.com        2400:6180:100:WW::XXX:YYYY

and for web.domain.com:

A        web.domain.com    139.59.0.0
AAAA     web.domain.com    2400:6180:100:WW::XXX:YYYY

After making any changes to NGINX, you should either restart or reload.

sudo service nginx restart

or

sudo service nginx reload

Thank you very much @jtittle, with your instructions. Which I judiciously followed I was able to resolve this issue. I wish I could give you more than 1 like on this Q&A thread. :D. I knew I made the right decision choosing DO!!

First off great job @jtittle, I really appreciate your consistency and care at handling this issue for @roshanbaliga . I am currently facing the same issue. So I’ve gone through the tutorial on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-enable-ipv6-for-digitalocean-droplets#enabling-ipv6-on-an-existing-droplet But I’m stuck here where I have to sudo nano /etc/network/interfacesand add a section for my ipv6 address. Instead I get this file:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# Source interfaces
# Please check /etc/network/interfaces.d before changing this file
# as interfaces may have been defined in /etc/network/interfaces.d
# See LP: #1262951
source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*.cfg

I have gone through installing nginx and letsencrypt.

here is my nginx server settings:

server {
    listen 80 ;
    listen [::]:80 ;
    listen 443 ssl http2 ;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2 ;

    root /var/www/example.com/html;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    include snippets/ssl-example.com.conf;
    include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

   location ~ /.well-known {
            allow all;
   }
}

Thanks in advance.

@roshanbaliga

Thanks for the update, definitely appreciated!

I was about to suggest that same link, though I was under the impression that the Droplet was setup and deployed with IPv6 enabled from the start. Next time I’ll make sure I lead with that so I can save the next person time and hassle!

That said, I am happy to hear that they were able to help and that you were able to get things up and running as needed!

@roshanbaliga

The only other issue that I can think of would be that NGINX may not be compiled with IPv6 support. Whether or not this is the case depends on the version of NGINX you’re running. The latest versions don’t require the compile option --with-ipv6, however, prior to the newer releases, older version of NGINX did.

You can check the compile options by running the following command from the CLI:

nginx -V

Which will detail every option that NGINX was compiled with for your build. If your version is 1.10.x or 1.11.x, you don’t need that compile option as it’s deprecated. If you’re build is older and it doesn’t show up when running the above, then your build of NGINX may not support IPv6 connections and that’d be why you’re unable to verify it.

The downside is that if you are running an older version and there’s not a newer version in the repo, then the best option is doing a source compile where you’ll have to define each option that NGINX should be compile with.

If that’s the route needed, I can help you there. I actually have a copy & paste solution to help with that, but before doing something like that, you’d need to backup any data in /etc/nginx that you don’t want destroyed (i.e. server block files for your website(s)) as we’d be deleting everything there and starting from scratch.