If you are here, you probably already know what Varnish is, but in case you don’t….https://www.varnish-cache.org/
Varnish Cache is an open source, state of the art web application accelerator. It is installed in front of your webserver where it will cache the content, resulting in a huge performance boost.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of way, lets get to it. As is the case with most things I post, this is not intended to be an official “how-to” document, but rather a journal of my adventures in doing it. As should always be the case I’m starting with the supplied installation documentation located here: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/3.0/installation/install.html#centos-redhat
Start with a vanilla minimal install of Centos 5.7. I did perform a yum update
& reboot after the initial installation of the OS, before starting with
installing Varnish.
Lets create a repo file and leverage Varnish’s existing repo. We also need libedit out of EPEL, so enabling that repo as well. I suppose I could have just grabbed the single RPM just as easily…
cd /tmp
wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
rpm -i epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
rpm --nosignature -i http://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/varnish-3.0/el5/noarch/varnish-release-3.0-1.noarch.rpm
Install Varnish and its various dependencies
yum -y install varnish
Fire it up!
service varnish start
Check that its alive (The 503 response code is expected right now)
# curl -I http://localhost:6081
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Server: Varnish
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Retry-After: 5
Content-Length: 419
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:27:30 GMT
X-Varnish: 1562514354
Age: 0
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: close
That’s about it, doesn’t get much easier than that. Perhaps if I get more ambitious I’ll post some configuration tweaks and or cool tricks (if I learn any).