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I would like the Apache webserver to normally deliver content with the "http/2"-Protocol, but to fall back to "http/1.1" if the connection stems from a certain user-agent, which has faulty http/2-Support.

My current workaround is to disable http/2 for the considered virtualhost completely, but due to efficiency concerns this protocol should only be disabled for a certain user-agent and should otherwise be used as a default for all other user-agents.

According to my understanding of the Apache documentation, using Apache's Protocols Directive inside Apache's <If> Directive will not work, as only directives that support the directory context can be used within the <If> Directive and the Protocols Directive does not support the directory context.

user96288
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2 Answers2

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You can’t do this. Whether to use HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 is decided as part of the TLS negotiation before the HTTP request (and hence the user agent) is sent.

The best you can do at that point is close the HTTP/2 connection with a HTTP_1_1_REQUIRED error code and hope the user agent will retry with an HTTP/1.1 request, but even then it will likely try with a new connection and upgrade again. Plus I’m not aware of any way to send this request via apache.

Barry Pollard
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If the goal is reliable clients, preferably using HTTP/2.0 if possible, but falling back to HTTP/1.1 otherwise, then there are a few things you can try.

The first is that there are a collection of Apache options for tweaking the HTTP/2.0 response, some of which break older browsers. I'd probably start by tinkering with these to see if you can find a combination that simply gets all the target browsers working.

The second is that you could try forcing a downgrade for your target agents. This isn't supported by the standard, so may cause more problems than it solves though. In practice, you'd build a conditional to detect the agent, then use mod_headers to strip any existing upgrade/connection headers, and replace them with:

Connection: upgrade
Upgrade: http/1.1

Third, you could have a pair of virtual hosts, one with both protocols enabled, and a second supporting only HTTP/1.1, then use a conditional to redirect agents as required.

Buffoonism
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  • As far as I understand, the additional virtual host only supporting HTTP/1.1 is the only standard-compliant option, although this of course requires a lot of redundant configuration. – user96288 Aug 03 '22 at 18:41
  • You could, of course reverse the protocol preference order, then try the upgrade header the other way around: default to HTTP/1.1, detect your problem agents, and if not one of them, upgrade to h2. That is standards based. You will though lose the advantage of the TLS/ALPN dropping the first request into h2 by default. – Buffoonism Aug 04 '22 at 04:42
  • To be fair though, unless your site is really busy, the difference between HTTP/1.1 and h2 isn't as noticeable as say getting your cachability or compression right. – Buffoonism Aug 04 '22 at 04:44