The PPA I had been getting nginx (stable) from decided to delete the whole PPA, with no announcement on
Patreon first. I only found out when unattended-upgrades started sending email that the Release file for
the PPA was missing. I have canceled my support. However, I learned some things in the process.
nginx-light Is Obsolete
First, the nginx-light package in Debian 13 (Trixie) and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is a transitional package. The
modern approach is to install nginx and whatever libnginx-mod-* packages are desired. If you’re making
this change on such a system, nginx is already installed, and should be marked manual before removing
nginx-light:
$ sudo apt-mark manual nginx
$ sudo apt remove nginx-light
I tried using the nginx apt repository (as published in extrepo because nobody should have to run gpg
ever again) but it is packaged against Debian 13, and thus doesn’t work with Ubuntu 24.04’s older OpenSSL.
Getting HTTP/2 Back
I switched back to the version included in the Ubuntu 24.04 repositories, but this downgraded from 1.28 to
1.24, which is before the introduction of a separate http2 on; configuration directive in 1.25.1. I
initially turned it off and proceeded, which meant my server didn’t provide HTTP/2 for a bit.
The solution is, older nginx uses an http2 in the listen directive:
listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
This “http2” should appear in all “listen 443” directives; certbot renew will leave it alone if it happens to be present.
Getting Brotli Compression Back
The other issue I had was that the servers were configured to support brotli compression. I got into a
state where the Ubuntu nginx couldn’t finish installing itself, because it didn’t recognize the brotli
configuration. Meanwhile, its failure stopped the process of setting up other packages, including the one
that would let nginx support brotli, libnginx-mod-http-brotli-filter.
Breaking that logjam required commenting out the brotli configurations, then finishing the package setup, before re-enabling brotli.
$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
This restarts the setup process, and the updated configuration lets it complete.
Looking Forward
I left myself good comments in the nginx configuration, because in a few months, Ubuntu 26.04.1 will be released, and my VPS will be eligible for upgrade. At that point, I’ll want to know all this again.
