How to implement SPDY with Rails 3.2.2 on Heroku?

Question

I'm hearing that SPDY is where things are likely headed, and I'd like to try to use it with a Rails site I'm running. I haven't been able to find any tutorials however, and the one gem I found doesn't seem to work (everyone is reporting the same error on it across all browsers).

Is it currently possible to implement SPDY on Heroku with a Rails app?

Puttee

Over a year later- is this possible now in Rails 4 and Heroku? – Puttee

Note that SPDY only works over TLS. – Gewgaw

Answer 1

No, there is no way to get SPDY on Heroku today, although I do hope that will change in the future. Heroku has their own HTTP "routing fabric" which is fronted by nginx frontends. The nginx team is working on a SPDY module, but there is no hard date for its release yet. In addition, Heroku would need to install it on their frontends, etc -- in other words, it would require some careful coordination.

If you are interested in testing SPDY with Rails, I would recommend checking out mod_spdy for Apache. You should be able to use Passenger in conjunction with mod_spdy, although that would have to run outside of Heroku for now.

Koeninger

Update: "Requests to Cedar apps are made directly to the application server – not proxied through an HTTP server like nginx..." (devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing). This doesn't mean that SPDY is any closer to being available on Heroku; I'm just clarifying the point that nginx is now out of the picture with the Cedar stack. – Breastbone

Ross, I believe there is still the "routing mesh" in front, which is responsible for SSL termination.. which means NPN negotiation is likely still out of the question. – Koeninger

Answer 2

Try setting up CloudFlare an SPDY CDN/proxy service

Coopery

Answer 3

You can set up a reverse proxy in front of your Heroku app. One way to do it is using Dockhero addon.

Here's an example with SPDY / HTTP/2 / QUIC support to your Rails app hosted with Heroku - https://github.com/dockhero/quic-protocol-demo

Dockhero add-on is in Private Alpha as of September 2016, try it for free by signing up at https://dockhero.io/

Cheri