Random Musings of an Insane Mind

Worked with a new client this week and needed to get the VCL working for their installation. They were running W3TC, but, this VCL should work for people running WP-Varnish or any plugin that allows Purging. This VCL is for Varnish 2.x.

There are still some tweaks, but, this appears to be working quite well.

backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8080";
}

acl purge {
    "10.0.1.100";
    "10.0.1.101";
    "10.0.1.102";
    "10.0.1.103";
    "10.0.1.104";
}

sub vcl_recv {
 if (req.request == "PURGE") {
   if (!client.ip ~ purge) {
     error 405 "Not allowed.";
   }
   return(lookup);
 }

  if (req.http.Accept-Encoding) {
#revisit this list
    if (req.url ~ "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|swf|flv|mp3|mp4|pdf|ico|png|gz|tgz|bz2)(\?.*|)$") {
      remove req.http.Accept-Encoding;
    } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "gzip") {
      set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "gzip";
    } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "deflate") {
      set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "deflate";
    } else {
      remove req.http.Accept-Encoding;
    }
  }
  if (req.url ~ "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|swf|css|js|flv|mp3|mp4|pdf|ico|png)(\?.*|)$") {
    unset req.http.cookie;
    set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?.*$", "");
  }
  if (req.http.cookie) {
    if (req.http.cookie ~ "(wordpress_|wp-settings-)") {
      return(pass);
    } else {
      unset req.http.cookie;
    }
  }
}

sub vcl_fetch {
# this conditional can probably be left out for most installations
# as it can negatively impact sites without purge support. High
# traffic sites might leave it, but, it will remove the WordPress
# 'bar' at the top and you won't have the post 'edit' functions onscreen.
  if ( (!(req.url ~ "(wp-(login|admin)|login)")) || (req.request == "GET") ) {
    unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
# If you're not running purge support with a plugin, remove
# this line.
    set beresp.ttl = 5m;
  }
  if (req.url ~ "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|swf|css|js|flv|mp3|mp4|pdf|ico|png)(\?.*|)$") {
    set beresp.ttl = 365d;
  }
}

sub vcl_deliver {
# multi-server webfarm? set a variable here so you can check
# the headers to see which frontend served the request
#   set resp.http.X-Server = "server-01";
   if (obj.hits > 0) {
     set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
   } else {
     set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
   }
}

sub vcl_hit {
  if (req.request == "PURGE") {
    set obj.ttl = 0s;
    error 200 "OK";
  }
}

sub vcl_miss {
  if (req.request == "PURGE") {
    error 404 "Not cached";
  }
}

While working with the prototype of a site, I wanted to have a particular panel image randomly chosen when the page was viewed. While this could be done on the server side, I wanted to move this to Varnish so that Varnish’s cache would be used rather than piping the request through each time to the origin server.

At the top of /etc/varnish/default.vcl

C{
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
}C

and our vcl_recv function gets the following:

  if (req.url ~ "^/panel/") {
    C{
      char buff[5];
      sprintf(buff,"%d",rand()%4);
      VRT_SetHdr(sp, HDR_REQ, "\010X-Panel:", buff, vrt_magic_string_end);
    }C
    set req.url = regsub(req.url, "^/panel/(.*)\.(.*)$", "/panel/\1.ZZZZ.\2");
    set req.url = regsub(req.url, "ZZZZ", req.http.X-Panel);
  }

The above code allows for us to specify the source code in the html document as:

<img src="/panel/random.jpg" width="300" height="300" alt="Panel Image"/>

Since we have modified the request uri in vcl_recv before the object is cached, subsequent requests for the same modified URI will be served from Varnish’s cache, without requiring another fetch from the origin server. Based on the other VCL and preferences, you can specify a long expire time, remove cookies, or do ESI processing. Since the regexp passes the extension through, we could also randomly choose .html, .css, .jpg or any other extension you desire.

In the directory panel, you would need to have

/panel/random.0.jpg
/panel/random.1.jpg
/panel/random.2.jpg
/panel/random.3.jpg

which would be served by Varnish when the url /panel/random.jpg is requested.

Moving that process to Varnish should cut down on the load from the origin server while making your site look active and dynamic.