Varnish is a web accelerator, specifically a caching HTTP reverse proxy, 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 load.
Pre-Flight Check
- These instructions are intended specifically for installing varnish on Fedora 23. If you’re using a different operating system, check out our guides to installing varnish on Fedora 21 or CentOS 7.
- We’ll be working as root on a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 23 server. Apache and PHP already are installed, configured, and running.
Step #1: Install Varnish
A single command installs Varnish:
dnf -y install varnish
Step #2: Start Varnish
To configure varnish to start at boot, run the following command:
systemctl enable varnish
That should return output similar to:
[root@host ~]# systemctl enable varnish
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/varnish.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/varnish.service.
To start Varnish:
systemctl start varnish
To check the status of Varnish:
systemctl status varnish
Varnish is configured to listen on port 6081 by default. It expects your web server to be 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/example.vcl
