Install Varnish on Debian 8

We are going to install the latest version of varnish which is 5.2 at the time of writing. In order to install the latest version, we have to download the source and compile it.  You have to install some dependencies to compile the Varnish:

apt-get install make automake autotools-dev libedit-dev libjemalloc-dev libncurses-dev libpcre3-dev libtool pkg-config python-docutils python-sphinx

Now you can download the Varnish from the repository:

wget https://varnish-cache.org/_downloads/varnish-5.2.1.tgz

You can also download and install other release from here:

https://varnish-cache.org/releases/index.html

Extract the “tar.gz” file with the command below:

tar xvzf varnish-5.*.tar.gz

Switch to the extracted directory and start compiling:

cd varnish-5.2*

Run the following commands one by one:

sh autogen.sh
sh configure 
make 
make install

Create Varnish 5.2 Service
In this section, we are going to create a “systemd” service for Varnish but first, we have to create a directory in order to store default configuration of Varnish

Make a directory named “varnish” in your “etc”:

cd 
mkdir /etc/varnish

Now you can paste the default configuration from the source in the above directory with the command below:

mv varnish-5.1.2/etc/example.vcl /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Then create a service file with your text editor in the following path:

nano /etc/systemd/system/varnish.service

Paste the following script in the file then save and exit:

[Unit]
Description=Varnish HTTP accelerator

[Service]
Type=forking
LimitNOFILE=131072
LimitMEMLOCK=82000
ExecStartPre=/usr/local/sbin/varnishd -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/varnishd -a :80 -b localhost:8080
ExecReload=/usr/share/varnish/reload-vcl

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Run the following command to take effect:

systemctl daemon-reload

Finally, your Varnish 5.2 has a “systemd” service and you can control it with the following commands:

systemctl enable varnish 
systemctl start varnish 
systemctl status varnish 
systemctl restart varnish

Testing Varnish

To make sure that your Varnish is working properly you can use the “curl” command.

First, install “Curl”:

curl -I localhost

Search for the following lines in the output:

X-Varnish: 2
Via: 1.1 
varnish (Varnish/5.1)

Src:
https://www.hugeserver.com/kb/install-varnish-5-1-cache-server-apache-debian-8-ubuntu-16/

https://varnish-cache.org/releases/index.html