Varnish is a powerful web application accelerator (also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy) that helps improve the performance of your web applications. In this guide, we will walk through the steps to install Varnish 7 for use with Nginx on Rocky Linux 8.

Step 1: Update Your System

Start by ensuring your system is up to date:

sudo dnf update -y

Step 2: Install EPEL Repository

Varnish is available in the EPEL repository. Install EPEL by running:

sudo dnf install epel-release -y

Step 3: Install Varnish

Now, install Varnish 7 using the following command:

sudo dnf install varnish -y

Step 4: Configure Varnish

By default, Varnish listens on port 6081. You can configure it to listen on port 80 (or any other port you wish) by editing the Varnish service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/varnish.service

Look for the line starting with ExecStart and modify it as follows:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/varnishd -a :80 -a :8080 -b 127.0.0.1:8080 -p default_ttl=3600 -p default_grace=3600

Step 5: Configure Nginx to Use Varnish

Open your Nginx configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Modify the server block to pass traffic through Varnish:

server {
        listen 8080; # Change to the port you configured Varnish to listen on
        location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; # Change this to point to your application server
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        }
    }

Step 6: Start and Enable Varnish

Start the Varnish service and enable it to run at startup:

sudo systemctl start varnish
sudo systemctl enable varnish

Step 7: Restart Nginx

After making changes to the Nginx configuration, restart Nginx:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Step 8: Verify Varnish Installation

To verify that Varnish is running correctly, use the following command:

varnishstat

You can also check if Varnish is working by making a request to your server:

curl -I http://your_server_ip

You should see a X-Varnish header in the response, indicating that Varnish is handling the request.

Conclusion

You have successfully installed and configured Varnish 7 for Nginx on Rocky Linux 8. This powerful caching tool will help improve the performance of your web applications.

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