Installing Varnish on Ubuntu 20.04

Varnish is a powerful HTTP accelerator that significantly improves website performance by caching content and serving it quickly to users. It acts as a reverse proxy, sitting in front of your web server, and stores a copy of frequently accessed web pages in memory. This allows Varnish to serve those pages directly to visitors, reducing the load on the backend server and speeding up response times.

Step 1: Update System Packages

Before installing Varnish, it is always a good idea to update the system packages to their latest versions:

Step 2: Install Varnish

To install Varnish on Ubuntu 20.04, use the following command:

Step 3: Configure Varnish

After installation, you need to configure Varnish to work with your web server. The main configuration file for Varnish is located at /etc/varnish/default.vcl.

You can open the file using a text editor:

Within the configuration file, you can define the backend server where Varnish will forward requests. By default, Varnish is configured to listen on port 6081 and forward requests to the localhost.

Once you have made the necessary changes, save the file and exit the text editor.

Step 4: Start and Enable Varnish

To start Varnish and enable it to start on boot, execute the following command:

Step 5: Adjust Firewall Settings

If your system has a firewall enabled, you need to allow incoming connections on the Varnish port. By default, Varnish listens on port 6081. You can open the port using the following command:

Step 6: Test Varnish

Once the installation and configuration are complete, you can test Varnish by accessing your website through the Varnish port. Simply replace the default web server port with the Varnish port (usually 6081) in the URL.

If Varnish is working correctly, you should see improvements in page load time due to caching.

Conclusion

By installing and configuring Varnish on your Ubuntu 20.04 server, you can greatly improve the performance and responsiveness of your website. With its powerful caching capabilities, Varnish can help to reduce the load on your backend server and provide a faster browsing experience for your visitors.