Installing Varnish¶
With open source software, you can choose to install binary packages or compile it yourself from source code. To install a package or compile from source is a matter of personal taste. If you don't know which method to choose, we recommend that you read this whole section and then choose the method you feel most comfortable with.
Source or packages?¶
Installing Varnish on most relevant operating systems can usually be done with with the specific systems package manager, typical examples being:
FreeBSD¶
- Binary package:
pkg_add -r varnish- From source:
cd /usr/ports/varnish && make install clean
Red Hat / CentOS¶
We try to keep the latest version available as prebuilt RPMs (el5 and el6) on repo.varnish-cache.org. See the online Red Hat installation instructions for more information.
Varnish is included in the EPEL repository, however due to incompatible syntax changes in newer versions of Varnish, only older versions are available.
We therefore recommend that you install the latest version directly from our repository, as described above.
Debian/Ubuntu¶
Varnish is distributed with both Debian and Ubuntu. In order to get
Varnish up and running type sudo apt-get install varnish. Please
note that this might not be the latest version of Varnish. If you
need a later version of Varnish, please follow the online installation
instructions for Debian or Ubuntu.
Compiling Varnish from source¶
If there are no binary packages available for your system, or if you want to compile Varnish from source for other reasons, follow these steps:
Download the appropriate release tarball, which you can find on http://repo.varnish-cache.org/source/ .
Alternatively, if you want to hack on Varnish, you should clone our git repository by doing.
git clone git://git.varnish-cache.org/varnish-cache
Build dependencies on Debian / Ubuntu¶
In order to build Varnish from source you need a number of packages installed. On a Debian or Ubuntu system these are:
- automake
- autotools-dev
- libedit-dev
- libjemalloc-dev
- libncurses-dev
- libpcre3-dev
- libtool
- pkg-config
- python-docutils
- python-sphinx
Build dependencies on Red Hat / CentOS¶
To build Varnish on a Red Hat or CentOS system you need the following packages installed:
- autoconf
- automake
- jemalloc-devel
- libedit-devel
- libtool
- ncurses-devel
- pcre-devel
- pkgconfig
- python-docutils
- python-sphinx
Compiling Varnish¶
The configuration will need the dependencies above satisfied. Once that is taken care of:
cd varnish-cache
sh autogen.sh
sh configure
make
The configure script takes some arguments, but more likely than not you can forget about that for now, almost everything in Varnish can be tweaked with run time parameters.
Before you install, you may want to run the test suite, make a cup of tea while it runs, it usually takes a couple of minutes:
make check
Don't worry if one or two tests fail, some of the tests are a bit too timing sensitive (Please tell us which so we can fix them.) but if a lot of them fails, and in particular if the b00000.vtc test fails, something is horribly wrong, and you will get nowhere without figuring out what.
Installing¶
And finally, the true test of a brave heart: sudo make install
Varnish will now be installed in /usr/local. The varnishd binary is in /usr/local/sbin/varnishd and its default configuration will be /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl.
After successful installation you are ready to proceed to the The Varnish Tutorial.