How to Install Varnish on Fedora 20

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Note:

Please note that this article is considered legacy documentation because Fedora 20 has reached its end-of-life support.

Varnish is a proxy and cache, or HTTP accelerator, designed to improve performance for busy, dynamic websites. By redirecting traffic to static pages whenever possible, varnish reduces the number of dynamic page calls, thus reducing the load.

Pre-Flight Check

These instructions are intended specifically for installing the Varnish on Fedora 20.
I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 20 server with HTTPD and PHP already installed, configured, and running, and I’ll be logged in as root.

Step 1: Install Varnish

First, you’ll follow a simple best practice: ensuring the list of available packages is up to date before installing anything new. yum -y update At this point, installing Varnish is as simple as running just one command: yum -y install varnish

Step 2: Start Varnish

To configure varnish to start at boot, run the following command: systemctl enable varnish To start varnish, run the following command as root: systemctl start varnish To check the status of varnish, run the following command as root: systemctl status varnish Check the version of Varnish that is running: varnishd -V Varnish is configured to listen on port 6081 by default. It expects your web server to be local, or on the same server and listening on port 8080.

Step 3: Configuration File Locations

A basic and default configuration file can be found at: /etc/varnish/default.vcl An example configuration can be found in: /usr/share/doc/varnish/examples/default.vcl For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor To view or edit example.vcl: vim /usr/share/doc/varnish/examples/default.vcl