Setting Up Varnish In Linux

 

 

 

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This document provides a brief guide on how to install the Event Store with varnish reverse proxy in a linux environment. We will not be going into a lot of detail on how to properly configure varnish for your requirements much of that information can be found on their website https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/Introduction

The Event Store makes heavy use of caching for many items if not being secured. A reverse proxy can dramatically speed up the Event Store.

A reverse proxy can also be used to limit access to the Event Store without breaking http caching (authenticate to the proxy not to the Event Store itself). Since the Event Store is running http only on the loopback adapter users must enter through the reverse proxy to reach the Event Store. https://gist.github.com/benclark/2695148 contains a more configured varnish config that includes basic authentication as well as some other niceties such as putting headers on for hits/misses).

The first thing that we will need to do is to install varnish

sudo curl http://repo.varnish-cache.org/debian/GPG-key.txt | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://repo.varnish-cache.org/ubuntu/ precise varnish-3.0" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install varnish

The next thing to do is to configure varnish.

sudo vi /etc/default/varnish

Edit the are that looks like

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
             -T localhost:6082 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -S /etc/varnish/secret \
             -s malloc,256m"

Replace the port with the port you want to run on. Then

sudo vi /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Set it to:
backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "2114";
}

Now you would sudo service varnish restart to restart varnish and you should be up and running with a reverse proxy. If you want to check out the status of varnish you can check with varnishstat from the command line.