INSTALL.varnish

= Setting up Varnish for your Noosfero site

Varnish is a HTTP caching server, and using it together with Noosfero is highly
recommended. See http://www.varnish-cache.org/ for more information on Varnish.

Varnish can be set up to use with Noosfero with the following steps:

1) setup Noosfero with apache according to the INSTALL file.

2) install Varnish

  # apt-get install varnish

Noosfero was tested with Varnish 2.x. If you are using a Debian Lenny (and you
should, unless Debian already released Squeeze by now), make sure you install
varnish from the lenny-backports suite.

3) Enable varnish logging:

3a) Edit /etc/default/varnishncsa and uncomment the line that contains:

VARNISHNCSA_ENABLED=1

The varnish log will be written to /var/log/varnish/varnishncsa.log in an
apache-compatible format. You should change your statistics generation software
(e.g. awstats) to use that instead of apache logs.

3b) Restart Varnish Logging service

  # invoke-rc.d varnishncsa start

4) Change Apache to listen on port 8080 instead of 80

4a) Edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf, and:

  * change 'Listen 80' to 'Listen 127.0.0.1:8080'
  * change 'NameVirtualHost *:80' to 'NameVirtualHost *:8080'

4b) Edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*, and change '<VirtualHost *:80>' to '<VirtualHost *:8080>'

4c) Restart apache

  # invoke-rc.d apache2 restart

5) Change Varnish to listen on port 80

5a) Edit /etc/default/varnish and change '-a :6081' to '-a :80'

5b) Restart Varnish

  # invoke-rc.d varnish restart

6) Configure varnish to fit noosfero
(assuming Noosfero is installed in /var/lib/noosfero)

6a) Configure noosfero to do specific routines to varnish

Add the following line to your /etc/varnish/default.vcl file:

  include "/var/lib/noosfero/etc/noosfero/varnish-noosfero.vcl";

6b) Configure varnish to store separate caches for each language

Add the following line to your /etc/varnish/default.vcl file:

  include "/var/lib/noosfero/etc/noosfero/varnish-accept-language.vcl";

7) Restart Varnish

  # invoke-rc.d varnish restart

Thanks to Cosimo Streppone for varnish-accept-language. See
http://github.com/cosimo/varnish-accept-language for more information.

 -- Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@colivre.coop.br>  Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:29:27 -0300