H2O

the optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 server

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Install

Installing a Binary Package

Thanks to others, H2O is provided as a binary package on some environments. Therefore you may try to at first install the software using your favorite packaging system, and then resort to installing from source as described below.

At the time being, following packages are known to be actively maintained¹:

• FreeBSD
• Homebrew (OS X)
• RPM (Fedora, RHEL/CentOS, OpenSUSE)
• Docker Image

Installing from Source

Download a release version from the releases page or clone the master branch from the source repository, and build it using CMake².

% cmake -DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL=on .
% make
% sudo make install

When complete, H2O will be installed under /usr/local.

Start the installed server using the example configuration to confirm that it actually works (note: without the use of -m option the server runs as a foreground process; press Ctrl-C to stop).

% /usr/local/bin/h2o -c examples/h2o/h2o.conf

The example configuration starts a server that listens to port 8080 (HTTP) and port 8081 (HTTPS). Try to access the ports using the protocols respectively (note: when accessing via HTTPS it is likely that you would see hostname mismatch errors reported by the web browsers).

When complete, proceed to Configure section for how to setup the server.

CMake Options

Following list shows the interesting arguments recognized by CMake.

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=directory

This option specifies the directory to which H2O will be installed (default: /usr/local).

-DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL=on|off

This option instructs whether or not to use LibreSSL being bundled (default: off if OpenSSL version >= 1.0.2 is found, on if otherwise). Read the section below for comparison between OpenSSL and LibreSSL.

-DWITH_MRUBY=on|off

This option instructs whether or not to build the standalone server with support for scripting using mruby. It is turned on by default if the prerequisites (bison, ruby and the development files³) are found.

Installing from Source, using OpenSSL

Generally speaking, we believe that using LibreSSL is a better choice for running H2O, since LibreSSL not only is considered to be more secure than OpenSSL but also provides support for new ciphersuites such as chacha20-poly1305 which is the preferred method of Google Chrome⁴. However, it is also true that LibreSSL is slower than OpenSSL on some benchmarks. So if you are interested in benchmark numbers, using OpenSSL is a reasonable choice.

The difficulty in using OpenSSL is that the HTTP/2 specification requires the use of an extension to the TLS protocol named ALPN, which has only been supported since OpenSSL 1.0.2⁵. Therefore it is highly likely that you would need to manually install or upgrade OpenSSL on your system.

Once you have installed OpenSSL 1.0.2, it is possible to build H2O that links against the library. As an safeguard it is advised to use -DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL set to off, so that the server would not accidentally link against the bundled LibreSSL. CMake will search for OpenSSL by looking at the default search paths.

% cmake -DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL=off
% make
% sudo make install

Two ways exist to specify the directory in which CMake should search for OpenSSL. The preferred approach is to use the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

% PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2/lib/pkgconfig cmake -DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL=off
% make
% sudo make install

In case your OpenSSL installation does not have the lib/pkgconfig directory, you may use OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR environment variable to specify the root directory of the OpenSSL being installed. However, it is likely that CMake version 3.1.2 or above is be required when using this approach⁶.

% OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2 cmake -DWITH_BUNDLED_SSL=off
% make
% sudo make install