H2O version 2.0.0-beta2 released, with a new "status" handler

Today I am happy to announce the release of H2O HTTP/2 server version 2.0.0-beta2.

The release comes with the new status handler that shows the HTTP requests in-flight. Now, you can monitor what's going on inside H2O!

Some notable features are:

• both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 requests are shown
• HTTP/2 priorities are shown
• the screen can be updated automatically by clicking the Refresh checkbox

Under the hood, the status is served via a JSON API (lib/handler/status.c L169), and rendered by a static HTML document(share/h2o/status/index.html). So it would be easy for anyone to extend the status or retrieve and use the status from another program.

The documentation of the status handler can be found here.

File-level mapping introduced in H2O version 2.0

As the developer of H2O, the lack of ability to define a mapping for a specific path (not a directory) has been one of the complaints I hear the most. Finally, we have a fix for the issue, and that is why the next release will be given the number 2.0.

Starting from H2O version 2.0.0beta-1, it is possible to write a configuration like the following. The example maps all requests to a FastCGI server, with the exception of /robots.txt and /favicon.ico being served statically.

paths:
  /:
    fastcgi.connect:
      port: /tmp/fcgi.sock
      type: unix
  /robots.txt:
    file.file: /path/to/robots.txt
  /favicon.ico:
    file.file: /path/to/favicon.png

Pretty straight forward, isn't it?

For details, please refer to the updated documentation of paths directive, or refer to the discussion in the pull request.

H2O HTTP/2 server goes 2.0 adding support for Brotli

Today, I am happy to announce the release of H2O version 2.0.0-beta1, the first release of the 2.0 series. In the release, we have added support for Brotli in two ways.

For those who do not know, Brotli is a new compression method developed by Google. It is said to compress files ~20% smaller than gzip - means less bandwidth consumed and faster rendering on the client side. Mozilla has already added support for Brotli in Firefox 44, and Chrome is gradually turning the knob on as well.

Starting with H2O version 2.0.0-beta1, when the file.send-compressed directive is set to ON, the server sends a file with .br or .gz suffix instead of file being requested should such file exist. For example, if index.html is requested with a Accept-Encoding: br request header, and if a file named index.html.br exists, the server sends the contents of index.hmtl.br as the response with the Content-Encoding: br response header being set. In case the client is capable of decompressing both algorithms both algorithms and if both of .br and .gz files exist, the .br file is selected as the response.

# send pre-compressed files (.br or .gz)
file.send-compressed: ON

The other directive: compress controls on-the-fly compression. When turned on, it compresses the response as it is being sent to the client, using either brotli or gzip depending on the configuration and browser support. This can be used for compressing output from PHP and other dynamically-generated content.

# perform on-the-fly compression (brotli or gzip)
compress: [ brotli, gzip ]

Server administrators may also be interested in fine-tuning the compression quality of the compression methods. The following configuration sets the compression quality of brotli to 4 and gzip to 6, a suggested setting by Understanding Brotli's Potential - The Akamai Blog. The compression speed becomes about half of the default (1 for both gzip and brotli), but the size of the content after compression is expected to become ~15% smaller for both methods.

# perform more effective (but CPU-intensive) compression
compress:
  brotli: 4
  gzip:   6

In my upcoming blogposts I will cover other changes in the 2.0 release of H2O. Stay tuned!

H2O version 1.7.1 released

Today we have shipped version 1.7.1 of the H2O HTTP/2 server.

It includes several bug fixes and stability improvements from 1.7.0. Users of existing versions are recommended to upgrade to 1.7.1.

Please refer to the Changelog of 1.7.1 for details.