For those of you who didn’t know, Varnish Cache is a powerful open source HTTP accelerator that can be installed in front of any Webserver such as Apache or Nginx. Varnish Cache can improve overall performance of your web server by caching contents. The Varnish cache stores the copy of user request’s and serves the same page when the user revisits the webpage. It makes your website really fast and accelerate your web site performance up-to 300 – 1000x (means 80% or more).
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple. I will show you through the step by step installation Varnish Cache 4 on CentOS 7.
Step 1. First, you need to enable EPEL repository on your system.
1 2 3 | ## RHEL/CentOS 7 64-Bit ## # wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm |
Step 2. Install Varnish using Yum command.
1 2 | yum-yupdate yum-yinstallvarnish |
Start varnish and make varnish start at boot:
1 2 | systemctlstartvarnish.service systemctlenablevarnish.service |
To check the status of varnish, run the following command:
1 | systemctlstatusvarnish |
Step 3. Configuring Varnish.
Edit the Varnish configuration under /etc/varnish:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | ### nano varnish.params # 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=192.168.1.5 VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT=80 # Admin interface listen address and port VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS=192.168.136.131 VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_PORT=6082 |
Edit default.vcl:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | ### nano default.vcl # Default backend definition. Set this to point to your content server. backenddefault{ .host="192.168.136.131"; .port="8080"; } |
Edit apache web server configuration and change listen port to 8080:
1 2 | ### nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf Listen8080 |
Edit firewall to allow the http service:
1 2 | firewall-cmd--permanent--zone=internal--add-service=http firewall-cmd--reload |
Restart the Apache and Varnish service for the changes to take effect:
1 2 | systemctlrestartvarnish systemctlrestarthttpd |
Step 4. Testing Varnish.
The test consists in making a HTTP request via curl and verifying that it is handled by Varnish:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | [root@idroot.net]# curl -I 192.168.146.131 HTTP/1.1403Forbidden Date:Mon,02Jun201523:04:10GMT Server:Apache/2.4.6(CentOS)PHP/5.4.16 Last-Modified:Thu,16Dec201419:30:58GMT ETag:"1321-5058a1e728280" Accept-Ranges:bytes Content-Length:4897 Content-Type:text/html;charset=UTF-8 X-Varnish:32779 Age:0 Via:1.1varnish-v4 Connection:keep-alive |
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed varnish cache. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Varnish 4 on CentOS 7 system.
