Setting up varnish on same server as webserver

Question

Our company recently decided to start working with the Varnish HTTP accelerator. Most important why we chose this solution was because we are a company that specializes in building web shops (Magento Enterprise) => Magento has a commercial plugin that works together with varnish.

The varnish configuration is already present on our testing environment, which contains 1 (software) load balancer running a varnish instance, 2 apache webservers and 1 storage + 1 mysql server.

However now the time has come to add the Varnish to our development environment (virtualbox with 1GB of ram running debian which has the database, webserver, files running all on the same machine)

Could anyone post a default.vcl configuration file for this setup?

Apache2 runs on port 80.

Thanks in advance, Kenny

EDIT: I found and posted the solution below.

Answer 1

This link has an excellent discussion of using Varnish on big production Web sites. In particular, look at the /etc/default/varnish or /etc/sysconfig/varnish DAEMON OPTS that put the cache 'file' into memory, instead of disk:

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/varnish-multiple-web-servers-drupal

The snippet I'm talking about:

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80,:443 \
             -T localhost:6082 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -u varnish -g varnish \
             -S /etc/varnish/secret \
             -p thread_pool_add_delay=2 \
             -p thread_pools=2 \
             -p thread_pool_min=400 \
             -p thread_pool_max=4000 \
             -p session_linger=50 \
             -p sess_workspace=262144 \
             -s malloc,3G"

Answer 2

I found the solution after more searching. Basically we need to sure that varnish is listening on the 80 port and apache on the 8080 port (or anything else!).

Here my default.vcl file (located in /etc/varnish/default.vcl):

# default backend definition.  Set this to point to your content server.
backend apache1 {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "8080";
}

director lb round-robin {
    {.backend=apache1;}
}

# add your Magento server IP to allow purges from the backend
acl purge {
  "localhost";
  "127.0.0.1";
}

# needed for TTL handling
C{
#include <errno.h>
#include <limits.h>
}C


sub vcl_recv {

    set req.backend=lb;

    if (req.request != "GET" &&
      req.request != "HEAD" &&
      req.request != "PUT" &&
      req.request != "POST" &&
      req.request != "TRACE" &&
      req.request != "OPTIONS" &&
      req.request != "DELETE" &&
      req.request != "PURGE") {
        /* Non-RFC2616 or CONNECT which is weird. */
        return (pipe);
    }

    # purge request
    if (req.request == "PURGE") {
        if (!client.ip ~ purge) {
            error 405 "Not allowed.";
        }
        purge("obj.http.X-Purge-Host ~ " req.http.X-Purge-Host " && obj.http.X-Purge-URL ~ " req.http.X-Purge-Regex " && obj.http.Content-Type ~ " req.http.X-Purge-Content-Type);
        error 200 "Purged.";
    }

    # we only deal with GET and HEAD by default    
    if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") {
        return (pass);
    }

    # static files are always cacheable. remove SSL flag and cookie
    if (req.url ~ "^/(media|js|skin)/.*\.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|css|js|swf|ico)$") {
        unset req.http.Https;
        unset req.http.Cookie;
    }

    # not cacheable by default
    if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Https) {
        return (pass);
    }

    # do not cache any page from
    # - index files
    # - ...
    if (req.url ~ "^/(index)") {
        return (pass);
    }

    # as soon as we have a NO_CACHE or admin cookie pass request
    if (req.http.cookie ~ "(NO_CACHE|adminhtml)=") {
        return (pass);
    }

    # normalize Aceept-Encoding header
    # http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/wiki/FAQ/Compression
    if (req.http.Accept-Encoding) {
        if (req.url ~ "\.(jpg|png|gif|gz|tgz|bz2|tbz|mp3|ogg|swf|flv)$") {
            # No point in compressing these
            remove req.http.Accept-Encoding;
        } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "gzip") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "gzip";
        } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "deflate" && req.http.user-agent !~ "MSIE") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "deflate";
        } else {
            # unkown algorithm
            remove req.http.Accept-Encoding;
        }
    }

    # remove Google gclid parameters
    set req.url = regsuball(req.url,"\?gclid=[^&]+$",""); # strips when QS = "?gclid=AAA"
    set req.url = regsuball(req.url,"\?gclid=[^&]+&","?"); # strips when QS = "?gclid=AAA&foo=bar"
    set req.url = regsuball(req.url,"&gclid=[^&]+",""); # strips when QS = "?foo=bar&gclid=AAA" or QS = "?foo=bar&gclid=AAA&bar=baz"

    # decided to cache. remove cookie
    #unset req.http.Cookie;

    return (lookup);
}

Here's the content of the varnish file (/etc/default/varnish):

# Configuration file for varnish
#
# /etc/init.d/varnish expects the variables $DAEMON_OPTS, $NFILES and $MEMLOCK
# to be set from this shell script fragment.
#

# Should we start varnishd at boot?  Set to "yes" to enable.
START=yes

# Maximum number of open files (for ulimit -n)
NFILES=131072

# Maximum locked memory size (for ulimit -l)
# Used for locking the shared memory log in memory.  If you increase log size,
# you need to increase this number as well
MEMLOCK=82000

# Default varnish instance name is the local nodename.  Can be overridden with
# the -n switch, to have more instances on a single server.
INSTANCE=$(uname -n)

# This file contains 4 alternatives, please use only one.

## Alternative 1, Minimal configuration, no VCL
#
# Listen on port 6081, administration on localhost:6082, and forward to
# content server on localhost:8080.  Use a 1GB fixed-size cache file.
#
# DAEMON_OPTS="-a :6081 \
#              -T localhost:6082 \
#        -b localhost:8080 \
#        -u varnish -g varnish \
#            -S /etc/varnish/secret \
#        -s file,/var/lib/varnish/$INSTANCE/varnish_storage.bin,1G"


## Alternative 2, Configuration with VCL
#
# Listen on port 6081, administration on localhost:6082, and forward to
# one content server selected by the vcl file, based on the request.  Use a 1GB
# fixed-size cache file.
#
DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
             -T localhost:6082 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -S /etc/varnish/secret \
             -s file,/var/lib/varnish/$INSTANCE/varnish_storage.bin,1G"


## Alternative 3, Advanced configuration
#
# See varnishd(1) for more information.
#
# # Main configuration file. You probably want to change it :)
# VARNISH_VCL_CONF=/etc/varnish/default.vcl
#
# # Default address and port to bind to
# # Blank address means all IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces, otherwise specify
# # a host name, an IPv4 dotted quad, or an IPv6 address in brackets.
# VARNISH_LISTEN_ADDRESS=
# VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT=6081
#
# # Telnet admin interface listen address and port
# VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
# VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_PORT=6082
#
# # The minimum number of worker threads to start
# VARNISH_MIN_THREADS=1
#
# # The Maximum number of worker threads to start
# VARNISH_MAX_THREADS=1000
#
# # Idle timeout for worker threads
# VARNISH_THREAD_TIMEOUT=120
#
# # Cache file location
# VARNISH_STORAGE_FILE=/var/lib/varnish/$INSTANCE/varnish_storage.bin
#
# # Cache file size: in bytes, optionally using k / M / G / T suffix,
# # or in percentage of available disk space using the % suffix.
# VARNISH_STORAGE_SIZE=1G
#
# # File containing administration secret
# VARNISH_SECRET_FILE=/etc/varnish/secret
# 
# # Backend storage specification
# VARNISH_STORAGE="file,${VARNISH_STORAGE_FILE},${VARNISH_STORAGE_SIZE}"
#
# # Default TTL used when the backend does not specify one
# VARNISH_TTL=120
#
# # DAEMON_OPTS is used by the init script.  If you add or remove options, make
# # sure you update this section, too.
# DAEMON_OPTS="-a ${VARNISH_LISTEN_ADDRESS}:${VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT} \
#              -f ${VARNISH_VCL_CONF} \
#              -T ${VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS}:${VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_PORT} \
#              -t ${VARNISH_TTL} \
#              -w ${VARNISH_MIN_THREADS},${VARNISH_MAX_THREADS},${VARNISH_THREAD_TIMEOUT} \
#          -S ${VARNISH_SECRET_FILE} \
#              -s ${VARNISH_STORAGE}"
#


## Alternative 4, Do It Yourself
#
# DAEMON_OPTS=""

After that you can monitor how varnish serves the content (from what source) by typing varnishlog | grep URL