dajobe/nghttpx repository overview

⁠nghttp2 HTTP/2.0 proxy and client docker image

This unofficial docker image provides HTTP/2.0 proxies and clients from nghttp2⁠ by Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa⁠:

• nghttpx HTTP/2.0 proxy that can work in front of an existing HTTP/1.0 server to provide support for HTTP/2.0 http or https URLs.
• nghttp HTTP/2.0 client to make HTTP/2.0 requests and show debugging info.

See github⁠ for the sources to this docker image.

See github releases⁠ for the changes between versions.

⁠Building the docker image

If you want to build the image yourself use this command:

$ docker build -t dajobe/nghttpx .

The image is prebuilt and uploaded the Docker hub so you skip this step and follow the next section.

⁠Running the nghttpx HTTP/2.0 Proxy Server

The proxy runs and uses a volume /data that generally should be mapped to a local data directory e.g $PWD/data to store logs and configuration.

The proxy will write access and error logs to files below the the /data/logs dir so it should appear in $PWD/data/logs if you use the volume mappings suggested. The default config file will be written to /data/etc/nghttpx.conf if it doesn't exist; if it is updated, it will not be replaced the next time the proxy is urn.

1. Proxy from HTTP/2.0 (non-encrypted) to HTTP/1.0

To run the proxy with non-encrypted HTTP/2.0 on port 80 that can serve http traffic, proxying to an HTTP/1.0 server, the hostname and port of the HTTP/1.0 server (the backend ) needs to be given via the HOST and PORT envariables:

$ mkdir -p data
$ docker run --name nghttpx -d -p 80:3000 -v $PWD/data:/data \
    -e HOST=192.168.1.2 -e PORT=12345 \
    dajobe/nghttpx

2. Proxy from HTTP/2.0 (encrypted) to HTTP/1.0

To run the proxy with TLS/SSL HTTP/2.0 on port 443 that can serve https traffic, in addition to the host and port config HOST and PORT envariables as decribed above, you will need to put the server TLS/SSL key file in $PWD/data/etc/keyfile and the certificate file in $PWD/data/etc/certfile and set the KEY_FILE and CERT_FILE envariable arguments to those paths like this:

$ mkdir -p data
$ docker run --name nghttpx -d -p 443:3000 -v $PWD/data:/data \
   -e HOST=192.168.1.2 -e PORT=12345 \
   -e KEY_FILE=/data/etc/keyfile CERT_FILE=/data/etc/certfile \
   dajobe/nghttpx

Generally HOST should be set to a private IP address of the host that docker(1) is running on and a separate server such as Apache or Nginx used to deliver the HTTP/1.0 content on the PORT such as 12345 in the examples above.

1. Proxy Admin

To stop the server container in either case above use:

$ docker stop nghttpx

and to delete the container (which won't lose the data and logs, since they are in $PWD/data) use:

$ docker rm nghttpx

If you want to run both the http (port 80) and https (port 443) HTTP/2.0 proxies, you can do that but you will need to run two servers with separate data dirs and configurations since the proxy runs in only one mode ( via the --frontend-no-tls flag to nghttpx ). You will also need to give the containers different names with the --name option to the docker(1) command

Finally the envariable ARGS can be used to set any additional proxy runtime args that may be required. Creating a custom config file at $PWD/data/etc/nghttpx.conf as describe above is an alternative.

⁠Running the nghttp HTTP/2.0 Client

You can also run the nghttp client included in the image if you want to test out HTTP/2.0:

$ docker run --rm -it dajobe/nghttpx nghttp -v https://nghttp2.org/
[  0.246] Connected
[  0.360][NPN] server offers:
		  * h2
		  * h2-16
		  * h2-14
		  * spdy/3.1
		  * http/1.1
The negotiated protocol: h2
...

(lots of output truncated)

See the docs⁠ for details on how to use the client.

Alternately, the most recent Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers support HTTP/2.0 over https although it may require some configuration.