In comparison to IPV4, IPV6 offers better speed on new gadgets, broader coverage of your website, and more security. Therefore, it makes sense to enable IPV6 for your website today. This tutorial covers how to enable IPV6 for existing droplets in Digital Ocean Cloud. Before, you proceed check the official tutorial to re-verify all the details. The tutorial at Digital Ocean is developer-friendly. However, this tutorial is for typical users.

► Step 1 → Shut down the droplet from Putty

sudo shutdown -h now

► Step 2 → Close the Putty. Power off the droplet from Digital Ocean Dashboard

► Step 3 → Take a snapshot of the droplet from the Digital Ocean Dashboard. In case something goes wrong, you will be able to retain the original droplet without the current changes.

► Step 4 → Enable IPV6 for the droplet at the Digital Ocean dashboard

► Step 5 → Power ON the droplet from the Digital Ocean dashboard

► Step 6 → Login to the droplet through Putty. As per the droplet operating system, use the command to access network configuration. Use the nano command to edit the file.

For Ubuntu 18.04

nano /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml

Check the official tutorial for further details.

For Debian and Ubuntu 16.04

nano /etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg

Next, copy and paste the following command

iface eth0 inet6 static
address substitute_your_primary_ipv6_address
netmask 64
gateway substitue_your_ipv6_gateway
autoconf 0
dns-nameservers 2001:4860:4860::8844 2001:4860:4860::8888 209.244.0.3

Press Ctrl + O and then Ctrl + X to save and exit

To restart networking, use the following commend

sudo systemctl restart networking

If everything went well, then there will be no return output

For Ubuntu 14.04

nano /etc/network/interfaces

Next, copy and paste the following command.

iface eth0 inet6 static
address substitute_your_primary_ipv6_address
netmask 64
gateway substitue_your_ipv6_gateway
autoconf 0
dns-nameservers 2001:4860:4860::8844 2001:4860:4860::8888 209.244.0.3

Press Ctrl + O and then Ctrl + X to save and exit.

To restart networking, use the following commend

ifdown eth0 ; ifup eth0

If everything went well, then there will be no return output

For Centos and Fedora

nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Next, copy Paste the following details.

IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6ADDR=primary_ipv6_address/64
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=ipv6_gateway
IPV6_AUTOCONF=no
DNS1=2001:4860:4860::8844
DNS2=2001:4860:4860::8888
DNS3=209.244.0.3

Press Ctrl + O and then Ctrl + X to save and exit

To restart networking, use the following command

sudo systemctl restart network

If everything went well, then there will be no return output

► Step 7 → To work with the new modification, reboot the droplet

reboot

► Step 8 → Now test whether your droplet is working with IPV6 configuration. To do this, try to reach Google IPV6 address from your droplet.

ping6 2001:4860:4860::8888

The output should be like this

PING 2001:4860:4860::8888(2001:4860:4860::8888) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8888: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=3.16 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8888: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=2.79 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8888: icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=2.85 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8888: icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=2.83 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8888: icmp_seq=5 ttl=57 time=2.88 ms

Congratulation, your website is no 27% faster than those websites still using IPV4 only.

► IPV6 for Your Website without IPV6 enabled at Hosting

The above steps require at least elementary developer skill. If you find yourself unable in following the above steps then here is the simplest solution to make your website IPV6 ready.

Cloudflare can make your website IPV6 ready. If your site is secured by Cloudflare then it is already IPV6 friendly. You do need to do anything. No further step required. You can test your website here to find out whether your website is IPV6 ready or not.