Using GeoIP Functionality in Varnish

[Cosimo Streppone]

In data 16 marzo 2010 alle ore 17:22:53, Sebastian Cabrera  
<scabrera-varnish at portachtzig.de> ha scritto:

> On a Website i want to have the posibility to do some rewriting due to
> the Country he's comming from. So if someone visits the Mainpage
> (domain.com) from US i want to have him visiting domain.com/us/.
> Does anyone have any experiences with that? How can i do this?

Maybe you could be interested at this code,

   http://github.com/cosimo/varnish-geoip/

We're *not* using it in production yet.
However, we're using a very similar one,

   http://github.com/cosimo/varnish-accept-language/

And it proved very useful and stable since we
increased the default sess_workspace to 128k.

> I just downloaded and installed the GeoIP Plugin from the varnish wiki
> (http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/GeoipUsingInlineC), but how can i use it?
> Is there any possibility to do something like
>
> if (get_country_code(client.ip) == "US") {
>     set req.url = "/us/"
> }

No, but you can use "C{ }C" blocks.

AFAIK the most common approach is to use HTTP headers as a sort
of "temporary storage", hence the need of upping sess_workspace.

The inline C code writes a new header, say "X-GeoIP-Country",
and then you can say:

     sub vcl_recv {
         ...
         C{
             /* "sp" is the varnish session data structure */
             my_c_function(sp);
         }C
         ...
         if (req.http.X-GeoIP-Country ~ "us") {
             set req.url = "/us/";
         }
     }

Have fun :)

-- 
Cosimo