Nginx, SSL, and SPDY, how to set it up on Ubuntu 14.04?

SPDY has been supported in nginx since version 1.3.15. In order to be able to use SPDY, you will need to have a recent version of nginx and OpenSSL version 1.0.0d or newer.

You can find out what version of OpenSSL you have installed by running openssl version. The command for nginx is nginx -v.

Once you’ve made sure your system supports SPDY, you can enable it by adding spdy to the listen line in your server block:

server {
    listen 443 ssl spdy;
}

Finally, restart nginx so that the changed can take effect:

sudo nginx -t
sudo service nginx restart

Hi Kamal,

Wonder if you could help - I’m having a related issue (new thread?) where the instructions to just ‘flip the spdy switch’ aren’t working for me.

Here’s the setup:

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
• Nginx 1.7.12 (upgraded today from Ubuntu mainline/dev PPA - includes ssl modules)
• OpenSSL 1.0.1 (build from 19/03/15 - upgraded today)

Have restarted Dovecot/Postfix/PHP5-FPM/Monit and of course Nginx.

Spdycheck.org is showing no spdy due to no NPN (but this version of openssl supports it, checked changelog), the Chrome/FF extensions also reporting no spdy. SSL Labs are reporting ‘No’ for NPN.

Also trying to get HSTS working with no joy either. Using the line below.

Where am I going wrong?

I have included the following in the sites-enabled host file, for the https server block:

listen 443 ssl spdy default_server;

[server_name, limit_con, log, keepalive_timeout, ssl certs...]

add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains";
add_header Alternate-Protocol  443:npn-spdy/3;

I’m seeing nothing about the latter two headers in the Network section of the Chrome/FF [F12] profilers.

Thanks!

Hi Kamal, thanks so much for your response.

I did indeed have sufficient versions of nginx and OpenSSL so adding that to the server block worked great for me.

Definitely notice an improvement in speed now.