Setup Varnish Cache

Setting up Varnish Cache with default.vcl

Varnish is a web application accelerator. You install it in front of your web application and it will speed it up significantly.

Once finished the reader should have a basic Varnish 3.0 cache up and running with the default configuration.

rpm --nosignature -i http://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/varnish-3.0/el6/noarch/varnish-release/varnish-release-3.0-1.el6.noarch.rpm

yum install varnish -y

chkconfig varnish on

Now the basic Varnish install is complete, now lets start it

/etc/init.d/varnish start

The default installation of Varnish will start off listening to port 6081

You will want to adjust this to listen on port 80 so that it will cache incoming web requests.

vim /etc/sysconfig/varnish

Adjust the following value to port 80

VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT=80

Now if you have httpd already started will you will want to stop and make httpd listen on another port, example port 81

sed -i 's/80/81/g' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Now restart apache so it will start listen on port 81

/etc/init.d/httpd restart && /etc/init.d/varnish restart

Now apache will be listing on port 81 and varnish will listen on port 80

Now you will want to edit you default.vcl file, to tell it use 127.0.0.1:81.

vim /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Change backend to use port 81, by default its set to port 80.

 backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "81";
}

Now one last varnish restart, and you are up and running with the default varnish installation

/etc/init.d/varnish restart

Now we check and make sure httpd is listen on port 81 and varnish is listening on port 80

netstat -nptl | grep -E '80|81'