Twisted Web in 60 Seconds: HTTP/2 2016-12-05

Hello, hello. It’s been a long time since the last entry in the “Twisted Web in 60 Seconds” series. If you’re new to the series and you like this post, I recommend going back and reading the older posts as well.

In this entry, I’ll show you how to enable HTTP/2 for your Twisted Web-based site. HTTP/2 is the latest entry in the HTTP family of protocols. It builds on work from Google and others to improve performance (and other) shortcomings of the older HTTP/1.x protocols in wide-spread use today.

Twisted implements HTTP/2 support by building on the general-purpose H2 Python library. In fact, all you have to do to have HTTP/2 for your Twisted Web-based site (starting in Twisted 16.3.0) is install the dependencies:

$ pip install twisted[http2]

Your TLS-based site is now available via HTTP/2! A future version of Twisted will likely extend this to non-TLS sites (which requires the Upgrade: h2c handshake) with no further effort on your part.