Installing and configuring Varnish on Ubuntu

On a brand new debian/*ubuntu distro, there are only a couple steps to do in order to make Varnish act as a proxy do its job in front of apache.

Installation:

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sudo apt-get install varnish

then you need to configure it to listen to the :80 port, editing /etc/default/varnish:

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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"

and telling it to forward requests to apache ( we’re gonna make it listen to the 8090 ), into the /etc/varnish/default.vcl:

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backend apache {
        .host = "127.0.0.1";
        .port = "8090";
}
sub vcl_fetch {
        remove req.http.X-Forwarded-For;
        set    req.http.X-Forwarded-For = req.http.rlnclientipaddr;
        return(deliver);
}

Then it’s time to tell apache it has to listen to a new port, in /etc/apache2/ports.conf:

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NameVirtualHost *:8090
Listen 127.0.0.1:8090

Make sure the hosts in your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf listen to :* or :8090, then you can start the services:

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/etc/init.d/apache2 start
/etc/init.d/varnish start

Now you have varnish responding to all the hosts on the :80: if you experience some troubles try to go deeper with this extended guide.