IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that every device needs to connect to the Internet. In order to make your web site available to the widest number of people at the fastest possible speed, your site needs to support both IPv4 and IPv6.
For your web site to respond over IPv6, your web server needs to be connected to a network with IPv6 connectivity. If you host your server on your own network, you may need to ask your IT team or Internet Service Provider (ISP) about receiving IPv6 connectivity. If you use a hosting provider, you may need to ask about getting an IPv6 address for your web server. If they are unable to provide an IPv6 address, you will need to either: 1) change to a different hosting provider; or 2) consider using a content delivery network (CDN) in front of your website.
Once you confirm you have IPv6 connectivity on your web server, you will:
-
Open your NGINX configuration file.
-
Add the second line below with
[::]:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
include snippets/ssl-params.conf;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
root /var/www/example.com/html;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
}
- Restart the NGINX service.
Note: This allows your web server to respond to incoming HTTP requests on any IPv6 addresses on the server. If you have a web server with multiple IPv6 addresses and you want the web server to respond to only a single IPv6 address, you will need to replace the :: in [::] with the specific IPv6 address.
Note: Developed on a server running Debian 10.2 and NGINX 1.14.2.
This documentation is part of the Internet Society's Open Standards Everywhere project. To find the most recent version or to provide feedback, please visit https://github.com/InternetSociety/ose-documentation