Getting started with Varnish Enterprise 6.0 Tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial shows how to do initial installation Varnish Enterprise 6.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, AlmaLinux 8 and Rocky Linux 8. Looking for another platform?

Prerequisites

Before you can start this tutorial, you should have:

A host running RHEL 8 or one of the alternatives listed above.
Credentials to access the Varnish Software EL repository.

Step 1 - Repository setup

In this step, replace TOKEN with your proper credentials for repository access.

Create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/varnish-software.repo with the following contents:

[varnish-enterprise]
name=Varnish Enterprise
baseurl=https://TOKEN:@packagecloud.io/varnishplus/60/el/8/x86_64
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
gpgkey=https://TOKEN:@packagecloud.io/varnishplus/60/gpgkey
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
metadata_expire=300

Enable the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository by installing the epel-release package:

sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2 - Installation

The module stream for Varnish Cache is enabled by default and needs to be disabled:

sudo dnf module disable varnish

Install Varnish Enterprise and VMODs:

sudo dnf install varnish-plus

Step 3 - Initial configuration

The configuration files for Varnish are:

/etc/varnish/default.vcl

The VCL configuration file that is loaded by default when Varnish starts. In this file you can specify the location of your web servers.
/usr/lib/systemd/system/varnish.service

The systemd unit file specifying the Varnish parameters, storage engines and the VCL configuration file to load on startup. This file should not be edited but overridden according to systemd best practices.

Step 4 - Process management

Varnish is started, stopped, restarted and reloaded using the following commands:

sudo systemctl start varnish
sudo systemctl stop varnish
sudo systemctl restart varnish
sudo systemctl reload varnish

Verify if Varnish is running using the following command:

sudo systemctl status -l varnish

Next steps

Varnish Enterprise 6.0 has now been installed. At this point it is possible to dive in to VCL and VMODs.

VCL resources: