Caching with Varnish

By Fahad Ahammed

- 2 minutes read - 356 words

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other web accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers, Varnish was designed as an HTTP accelerator. Varnish is focused exclusively on HTTP, unlike other proxy servers that often support FTP, SMTP and other network protocols.

Here , I will explain how to get varnish in front of apache2 or accelerate apache2 with varnish .

First do this :

Each line seperately run from terminal . or just (not recommended) :

sudo apt-get install varnish

Now do this :

nano /etc/default/varnish

And search for :

DAEMON OPTS=”-a *:6081

And edit that as :

DAEMON OPTS=”-a *:80

Also edit default.vcl to something else, I took “mysite.vcl” .

To save use ‘ctrl+x’ and then ‘y’ and ‘enter’ .

Now do this :

nano /etc/varnish/mysite.vcl

and put below texts there .

 

You have to edit above file which is red marked . Above YOUR IP is just your ip to not to allow any other to access a particular folder like wordpress /wp-admin/ . And that red marked “fahad” , you can change that to anything but both should be same . If you have no static ip than you should use Below texts :

 

 

Save this .

Now do this :

nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

Change:

To:

Apache will listen on that port .

You will have to edit your vhosts as well . Do This :

nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Change:

To:

You should know i am using here a command line text editor named nano which have a key binding of “ctrl+x” to save a file . Now do this :

Now test varnish , open terminal again and do this :

If you see anything written word “Varnish” then your procedure is ok and your varnish cache tool is caching 3 folders elements from your websites css,js and img folder . If you get error please tell me .

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