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.md file. If you used the Debian package to install noosfero, you don't need to do anything about this.

2) install Varnish

# apt-get install varnish

Install the RPAF apache module (or skip this step if not using apache):

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-rpaf

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

3a) Edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf, and:

• change Listen 80 to Listen 127.0.0.1:8080

3b) Edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*, and change <VirtualHost *:80> to <VirtualHost *:8080>

4) Varnish configuration

4a) Edit /etc/default/varnish

• change the line that says START=no to say START=yes
• change -a :6081 to -a :80
• add parameter -p vcc_allow_inline_c=on on DAEMON_OPTS

4b) Edit /etc/varnish/default.vcl and add the following lines at the end:

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

On manual installations, change /etc/noosfero/* to {Rails.root}/etc/noosfero/*

NOTE: it is very important that the *.vcl files are included in that order, i.e. first include varnish-noosfero.vcl, and after noosfero-accept-language.cvl.

5) Enable varnish logging:

5a) 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.

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

6) Restart services

# service apache2 restart
# service varnish restart
# service varnishncsa restart