Notes on how to enable HTTP/2 on Puma via early_hints, and enabling HTTP/2 on a reverse-proxy nginx server.

(Or any other rack-based gem, like Rails)

In time, the Puma Rack-based server gained HTTP/2 capabilities, but you need to enable it.

Given that one starts Puma with something like puma -C config/puma-config.rb, let's add one line of code into it:

early_hints true

Add that anywhere in "puma-config.rb", and Puma now has HTTP/2 capabilities.

With the Ruby server taken care of, I'm assuming you are also using nginx as a reverse proxy for Puma (possible upcoming notes), and that https (ssl) is properly setup (more notes).

In /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or the respective place that contains the configuration for the nginx file for your install, we change any listens on port 443 (ssl), and possibly 80 by adding http2 to the end of it (I have not tested it with port 80, as my website is https only):

ex:

listen 80; -> listen 80 http2

listen [ :: ]:80 -> listen [ :: ]:80 http2

so,

listen 443 ssl http2;

listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

Then a service nginx restart and your nginx server is now running on HTTP/2!

With these two options enabled in Nginx & Puma, you now have a server running in HTTP/2.

Ways to check: A HTTP version indicator addon for either Firefox or Chrome.

On Firefox: HTTP Version Indicator