HTTP/3 Explained - the online free book describing the protocols involved.
quicwg.org - home of the official protocol drafts
QUIC libraries we are experimenting with:
HTTP/3 and QUIC support in curl is considered EXPERIMENTAL until further notice. It needs to be enabled at build-time.
Further development and tweaking of the HTTP/3 support in curl will happen in the master branch using pull-requests, just like ordinary changes.
Build (patched) OpenSSL
% git clone --depth 1 -b openssl-3.0.0+quic https://github.com/quictls/openssl % cd openssl % ./config enable-tls1_3 --prefix=<somewhere1> % make % make install
Build nghttp3
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/nghttp3 % cd nghttp3 % autoreconf -fi % ./configure --prefix=<somewhere2> --enable-lib-only % make % make install
Build ngtcp2
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/ngtcp2 % cd ngtcp2 % autoreconf -fi % ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=<somewhere1>/lib/pkgconfig:<somewhere2>/lib/pkgconfig LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<somewhere1>/lib" --prefix=<somewhere3> --enable-lib-only % make % make install
Build curl
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/curl/curl % cd curl % autoreconf -fi % LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<somewhere1>/lib" ./configure --with-openssl=<somewhere1> --with-nghttp3=<somewhere2> --with-ngtcp2=<somewhere3> % make % make install
For OpenSSL 3.0.0 or later builds on Linux for x86_64 architecture, substitute all occurrences of “/lib” with “/lib64”
Build GnuTLS
% git clone --depth 1 https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls.git % cd gnutls % ./bootstrap % ./configure --prefix=<somewhere1> % make % make install
Build nghttp3
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/nghttp3 % cd nghttp3 % autoreconf -fi % ./configure --prefix=<somewhere2> --enable-lib-only % make % make install
Build ngtcp2
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/ngtcp2 % cd ngtcp2 % autoreconf -fi % ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=<somewhere1>/lib/pkgconfig:<somewhere2>/lib/pkgconfig LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<somewhere1>/lib" --prefix=<somewhere3> --enable-lib-only --with-gnutls % make % make install
Build curl
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/curl/curl % cd curl % autoreconf -fi % ./configure --without-openssl --with-gnutls=<somewhere1> --with-nghttp3=<somewhere2> --with-ngtcp2=<somewhere3> % make % make install
Build quiche and BoringSSL:
% git clone --recursive https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche % cd quiche % cargo build --package quiche --release --features ffi,pkg-config-meta,qlog % mkdir quiche/deps/boringssl/src/lib % ln -vnf $(find target/release -name libcrypto.a -o -name libssl.a) quiche/deps/boringssl/src/lib/
Build curl:
% cd .. % git clone https://github.com/curl/curl % cd curl % autoreconf -fi % ./configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,$PWD/../quiche/target/release" --with-openssl=$PWD/../quiche/quiche/deps/boringssl/src --with-quiche=$PWD/../quiche/target/release % make % make install
If make install
results in Permission denied
error, you will need to prepend it with sudo
.
Build msh3:
% git clone --depth 1 --recursive https://github.com/nibanks/msh3 % cd msh3 && mkdir build && cd build % cmake -G 'Unix Makefiles' -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo .. % cmake --build . % cmake --install .
Build curl:
% git clone https://github.com/curl/curl % cd curl % autoreconf -fi % ./configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,/usr/local/lib" --with-msh3=/usr/local --with-openssl % make % make install
Run from /usr/local/bin/curl
.
Build msh3:
% git clone --depth 1 --recursive https://github.com/nibanks/msh3 % cd msh3 && mkdir build && cd build % cmake -G 'Visual Studio 17 2022' -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo .. % cmake --build . --config Release % cmake --install . --config Release
Note - On Windows, Schannel will be used for TLS support by default. If you with to use (the quictls fork of) OpenSSL, specify the -DQUIC_TLS=openssl
option to the generate command above. Also note that OpenSSL brings with it an additional set of build dependencies not specified here.
Build curl (in Visual Studio Command prompt):
% git clone https://github.com/curl/curl % cd curl/winbuild % nmake /f Makefile.vc mode=dll WITH_MSH3=dll MSH3_PATH="C:/Program Files/msh3" MACHINE=x64
Note - If you encounter a build error with tool_hugehelp.c
being missing, rename tool_hugehelp.c.cvs
in the same directory to tool_hugehelp.c
and then run nmake
again.
Run in the C:/Program Files/msh3/lib
directory, copy curl.exe
to that directory, or copy msquic.dll
and msh3.dll
from that directory to the curl.exe
directory. For example:
% C:\Program Files\msh3\lib> F:\curl\builds\libcurl-vc-x64-release-dll-ipv6-sspi-schannel-msh3\bin\curl.exe --http3 https://www.google.com
--http3
Use HTTP/3 directly:
curl --http3 https://nghttp2.org:4433/
Upgrade via Alt-Svc:
curl --alt-svc altsvc.cache https://quic.aiortc.org/
See this list of public HTTP/3 servers
Check out the list of known HTTP3 bugs.
This is not advice on how to run anything in production. This is for development and experimenting.
An existing local HTTP/1.1 server that hosts files. Preferably also a few huge ones. You can easily create huge local files like truncate -s=8G 8GB
- they are huge but do not occupy that much space on disk since they are just big holes.
In my Debian setup I just installed apache2. It runs on port 80 and has a document root in /var/www/html
. I can get the 8GB file from it with curl localhost/8GB -o dev/null
In this description we setup and run an HTTP/3 reverse-proxy in front of the HTTP/1 server.
You can select either or both of these server solutions.
Get, build and install quictls, nghttp3 and ngtcp2 as described above.
Get, build and install nghttp2:
git clone https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2.git cd nghttp2 autoreconf -fi PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/home/daniel/build-quictls/lib/pkgconfig:/home/daniel/build-nghttp3/lib/pkgconfig:/home/daniel/build-ngtcp2/lib/pkgconfig LDFLAGS=-L/home/daniel/build-quictls/lib CFLAGS=-I/home/daniel/build-quictls/include ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode --prefix=/home/daniel/build-nghttp2 --disable-shared --enable-app --enable-http3 --without-jemalloc --without-libxml2 --without-systemd make && make install
Run the local h3 server on port 9443, make it proxy all traffic through to HTTP/1 on localhost port 80. For local toying, we can just use the test cert that exists in curl's test dir.
CERT=$CURLSRC/tests/stunnel.pem $HOME/bin/nghttpx $CERT $CERT --backend=localhost,80 \ --frontend="localhost,9443;quic"
Install caddy, you can even put the single binary in a separate directory if you prefer.
In the same directory you put caddy, create a Caddyfile
with the following content to run an HTTP/3 reverse-proxy on port 7443:
{ auto_https disable_redirects servers :7443 { protocol { experimental_http3 } } } localhost:7443 { reverse_proxy localhost:80 }
Then run caddy:
./caddy start