To install the Varnish Virtual Registry on a Debian or Ubuntu system, you can install the varnish-supervisor DEB package. This package is in fact installed in the varnish/orca Docker image, and the only difference is that varnish/orca comes with additional default configuration.
curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/varnishplus/60-enterprise/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt -y install varnish-supervisor
Verify successful installation:
varnish-supervisor --version
The varnish-supervisor service should start automatically:
systemctl status varnish-supervisor
The package installs a default configuration file in /etc/varnish-supervisor/default.yaml. You can either edit this file directly (it won’t be replaced when upgrading the package), or change the --config argument to a different path:
sudo systemctl edit --full varnish-supervisor
To have the changes take effect, restart the service:
sudo systemctl restart varnish-supervisor
For more information about Varnish Virtual Registry configuration, take a look at the configuration reference.
Varnish Virtual Registry has a health-check endpoint at /healthz, and will respond with a 200 OK to all requests on that path regardless of Host.
curl http://localhost/healthz -I
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:17:17 GMT
Content-Length: 0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: keep-alive
The default configuration has the Virtual Registry listening for HTTP traffic on port 80. If you have changed this to a different port, make sure to curl the right port and protocol.