Backups

Backups and Versioning in Varnish Controller

Varnish Controller maintains two different types of history related to VCL deployments:

Deploy logs and file versions (database-stored)

The controller keeps track of all the deployments in its database. You can list them

in UI via the rollback tab of a VCLGroup page
via the REST API
using vcli

It is important to note that they are not automatically cleaned up. If space management is a concern, you can delete them manually:

Delete any deploy logs that are no longer needed and not currently deployed.
Delete file versions if you no longer need to keep historical VCL files (for example with [vc]vcli file delete](../cli/vcli/vcli_file_delete)

Deployment backups (on the Varnish nodes)

The agents will keep local copies of the recently deployed VCLs. By default, this is limited to 20 backups, but this can easily be changed with the -max-backups argument.

Backups include:

restore.sh (script to reload via varnishadm)
cmds.cli (Varnish CLI commands for reloading VCLs)
Associated VCL files
base_url_certificate/ directory (if configured)

After each successful backup, the agent updates a symlink (cmds.cli in the agent’s base directory) to point to the latest backup. This ensures Varnish can always load from the most recent successful configuration on startup.

You can use the restore.sh script to redeploy a certain version manually.