Speed up Apache Website with Varnish HTTP Cache

Introduction.

Varnish is reverse-proxy Accelerator is a web application that is also known as temporary proxy HTTP cache scope and makes the website very fast. Depending on the architecture used, it can make site 4-8 times faster.

Before Installation Requirements.

- Apache web-server installed.

- Need EPEL repositories installed for Cantos/RHEL. No need for Ubuntu.

Centos/RHEL 

sudo rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/epel-release-7-11.noarch.rpm 

Install varnish.

Centos/RHEL 

sudo yum install varnish                                             

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install varnish                                          

After installing Varnish, stop, start and enable varnish service

sudo systemctl stop varnish                                         

sudo systemctl start varnish                                         

sudo systemctl enable varnish                                       

  

Configuration

To work together, we must regulate both varnish and Apache.

Configure varnish to use port 80

Open varnish configuration file for change pot,

sudo nano /etc/varnish/varnish.params                                  For CentOS/RHEL

sudo nano /etc/default/varnish                                                      For Ubuntu

change the port from 6081 to 80,

Save the file when you’re done.

Next, open the default.vcl file

sudo nano /etc/varnish/default.vcl      

And make following changes,

#Default backend definition. Set this to point to your content server.

backend default {

.host = "127.0.0.1";

.port = "8080";

}

Save and close file

Then, Restart both Varnish

sudo systemctl restart varnish                                       

Switch apache2 default port to 8080 

Open ‘httpd.conf’

sudo vim /etc/httpd/httpd.conf                                      

change the port 80 to 8080

Listen 8080

Restart the Apache service to apply the changes.

sudo systemctl restart httpd For                                           For CentOS/RHEL

sudo systemctl restart apache2                                                     For Ubuntu

Now everything is setup perfectly.

Varnish should be the listen of port 80.

Execute the this command for test configuration.

curl -I http://localhost

Output is something like this,

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2018 18:50:37 GMT

Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Ubuntu)

Last-Modified: Sun, 10 Oct 2018 18:30:12 GMT

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Content-Type: text/html

X-Varnish: 10 3

Age: 9

Via: 1.1 varnish (Varnish/5.0)

ETag: W/"2aa6-554ff0b3c88c9-gzip"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Connection: keep-alive

Finally, You successfully installed varnish for speedup Apache web server.

Thanks for being here.