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Varnish CLI Commands, Tips and Tricks

Apr 9, 2020     5 min read

Varnish as a command line interface (CLI) which can control and change most of the operational parameters and the configuration of Varnish, without interrupting the running service.

Install Varnish

sudo apt install varnish -y

Start Varnish

sudo systemctl start varnish

Stop Varnish

sudo systemctl stop varnish

Restart Varnish

sudo systemctl restart varnish

In order to restart varnish I have to kill the process:

sudo killall varnishd

Status Check

sudo /etc/init.d/varnish status

OR

sudo service varnish status

Debug Varnish

sudo varnishd -d -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Default VCL file location

/etc/varnish/default.vcl

netstat

Log in to the Varnish server and enter the following command:

sudo netstat -tulpn

Look for the following output in particular:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80                  0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      32614/varnishd
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:58484             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      32604/varnishd
tcp        0      0 :::8080                     :::*                    LISTEN      26822/httpd
tcp        0      0 ::1:48509                   :::*                    LISTEN      32604/varnishd

Put Varnish on port 80

Until now we’ve been running with Varnish on a high port, for testing purposes. You should test your application and if it works OK we can switch, so Varnish will be running on port 80 and your web server on a high port.

First we kill off varnishd:

sudo pkill varnishd

and stop your web server. Edit the configuration for your web server and make it bind to port 8080 instead of 80. Now open the Varnish default.vcl and change the port of the default backend to 8080.

Start up your web server and then start varnish:

sudo varnishd -f /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,1G -T 127.0.0.1:2000

Uninstall

sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove varnish
sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove varnish

Reference link

Installing and configuring Varnish

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