curl/docs/HTTP3.md

HTTP3 (and QUIC)

Resources

HTTP/3 Explained - the online free book describing the protocols involved.

QUIC implementation - the wiki page describing the plan for how to support QUIC and HTTP/3 in curl and libcurl.

quicwg.org - home of the official protocol drafts

QUIC libraries

QUIC libraries we're experiementing with:

ngtcp2

quiche

Experimental!

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 in the master branch using pull-requests, just like ordinary changes.

ngtcp2 version

Build

Build (patched) OpenSSL

 % git clone --depth 1 -b openssl-quic-draft-23 https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/openssl
 % cd openssl
 % ./config enable-tls1_3 --prefix=<somewhere1>
 % make
 % make install_sw

Build nghttp3

 % cd ..
 % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/nghttp3
 % cd nghttp3
 % autoreconf -i
 % ./configure --prefix=<somewhere2> --enable-lib-only
 % make
 % make install

Build ngtcp2

 % cd ..
 % git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/ngtcp2
 % cd ngtcp2
 % autoreconf -i
 % ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=<somewhere1>/lib/pkgconfig:<somewhere2>/lib/pkgconfig LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<somehere1>/lib" --prefix==<somewhere3>
 % make
 % make install

Build curl

 % cd ..
 % git clone https://github.com/curl/curl
 % cd curl
 % ./buildconf
 % LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<somewhere1>/lib" ./configure --with-ssl=<somewhere1> --with-nghttp3=<somewhere2> --with-ngtcp2=<somewhere3>
 % make

Running

Make sure the custom OpenSSL library is the one used at run-time, as otherwise you'll just get ld.so linker errors.

Invoke from command line

curl --http3 https://nghttp2.org:8443/

quiche version

build

Clone quiche and BoringSSL:

 % git clone --recursive https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche

Build BoringSSL (it needs to be built manually so it can be reused with curl):

 % cd quiche/deps/boringssl
 % mkdir build
 % cd build
 % cmake -DCMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE=on ..
 % make -j`nproc`
 % cd ..
 % mkdir .openssl/lib -p
 % cp build/crypto/libcrypto.a build/ssl/libssl.a .openssl/lib
 % ln -s $PWD/include .openssl

Build quiche:

 % cd ../..
 % QUICHE_BSSL_PATH=$PWD/deps/boringssl cargo build --release --features pkg-config-meta

Clone and build curl:

 % cd ..
 % git clone https://github.com/curl/curl
 % cd curl
 % ./buildconf
 % ./configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,$PWD/../quiche/target/release" --with-ssl=$PWD/../quiche/deps/boringssl/.openssl --with-quiche=$PWD/../quiche/target/release
 % make -j`nproc`

Running

Make an HTTP/3 request.

 % src/curl --http3 https://cloudflare-quic.com/
 % src/curl --http3 https://facebook.com/
 % src/curl --http3 https://quic.aiortc.org:4433/
 % src/curl --http3 https://quic.rocks:4433/