I run my web site off a Debian server on GCE. I like tinkering with the configuration. I hear that HTTP 2 is the new hot thing, and that’s going to mean supporting ALPN which means upgrading to OpenSSL 1.0.2 and nginx 1.9.5 or newer. But they isn’t supported in Debian 8.

I used apt pinning to bring in versions of nginx and OpenSSL from testing into my jessie server. I first added sources for testing by creating a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/testing.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib

Then I configured my pin priorities by creating /etc/apt/preferences with:

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

After an apt-get update I could install the version of nginx from testing, bringing in the appropriate version of OpenSSL: apt-get -t=testing install nginx-full

Then it was just a matter of changing:

listen 443 ssl;

to:

listen 443 ssl http2;

wherever I wanted it.

Now it looks like I’m serving over HTTP/2. Not that it makes a whole lot of obvious difference yet.