Cookies - set on non-cached pages, read on all pages

[David Murphy]

Thanks Rob

We use

 req.url ~ "^/admin/"

to identify the admin area of the site and we force Varnish to grab content from back end and not cache anything if this is part of URL. Works fine for us.

So,for JS personalisation you're unsetting cookies when saving the pages to cache, and then unsetting when serving from cache? 

Something like? ...

sub vcl_recv {
    if (!req.url ~ "^/admin") {
        unset req.http.cookie;
    }
//snip
}

sub vcl_fetch {
    if (req.url ~ "^/admin") {
        unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
    }
//snip
}


Best, David

________________________________________
From: Rob S [rtshilston at gmail.com]
Sent: 20 April 2010 16:40
To: David Murphy
Cc: Richard Chiswell; varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
Subject: Re: Cookies - set on non-cached pages, read on all pages

We too operate a Varnish cache + JS for personalisation.  Our approach
is as follows:

Normal GET request for normal public pages: unset cookie, serve cached page.
Requests for login page, admin or pages that are more personal than can
be achieved with JS: Make varnish transparent.

This is pretty simple, and works well for us.  However, if you're not
able to identify the admin / login areas from the URL, then you might
find this quite hard.


Rob



David Murphy wrote:
> Very helpful, thanks.
>
> So the admin cookies are different from the simple JS cookies that provide the 'Hello <user>' value?
>
> My understanding is that if a page is cached with unique cookie then there will be an object for every unique cookie value (tom, dick, harry etc) an as a result we'll get a low hit-rate. However, my guess is that I've misunderstood how this works, and that I'm wrong :)
>
> Is it just the cookie name ('firstname') that is important rather than the cookie value ('Tom') when decided whether to unset the cookie on a varnish cached page?
>
> Thanks, David
> ________________________________________
> From: Richard Chiswell [richard.chiswell at mangahigh.com]
> Sent: 20 April 2010 16:13
> To: David Murphy
> Cc: varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
> Subject: Re: Cookies - set on non-cached pages, read on all pages
>
> Hi David,
>
> On 20/04/2010 16:08, David Murphy wrote:
>
>> Thanks Rich
>>
>> When you say ignore  do you mean unset e.g.
>>
>> sub vcl_recv {
>>     //snip
>>    unset req.http.cookie;
>> }
>>
>>
> We do something like:
> sub vcl_recv {
> ...
> if (req.http.Cookie) {
>       set req.http.Cookie = ";" req.http.Cookie;
>       set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "; +", ";");
>       set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie,
> ";(Cookies|WeWantTo|Keep)=", "; \1=");
>       set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, ";[^ ][^;]*", "");
>       set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "^[; ]+|[; ]+$", "");
>     if (req.http.Cookie == "") {
>          remove req.http.Cookie;
>      }
> }
> ...
> }
>
> The Cookies|We... regular expression are for things like admin cookies
> which we want to be set.
>
> Rich
>
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