neverending saga of varnish + joomla

[Lars Jørgensen]

Hi,

Good write-up. But do you really need to make Joomla send special headers to Varnish, though? If a cookie is present in the client request, Varnish will automatically pass the request to the backend (unless you've tinkered in vcl_recv). Like this:


1.       req index.html, no cookies present

2.       Varnish: hit, strip set-cookie

3.       req news.html, no cookies present

4.       Varnish: hit, strip set-cookie

5.       req login.html, no cookies present

6.       Varnish: pass, allow set-cookie

7.       req index.html, cookie present

8.       Varnish: pass, cookie present

9.       req news.html, cookie present

10.   Varnish: pass, cookie present

As you see, once users log in, everything gets passed. Or piped, if you prefer, but pass should be your first choice.


Lars

From: varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org [mailto:varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org] On Behalf Of Kevin
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 12:13 AM
To: varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
Subject: RE: neverending saga of varnish + joomla

Hey there,

I thought I’d send a note that I have finally gotten Varnish to work with Joomla. I wanted to say thanks to everyone on this list that has helped me throughout the last little while until I finally got it working.

I ended up modifying the joomla code to send an additional HTTP header to identify if the session was logged in or not, as well , I heeded the advice here and stripped all cookies except for the login page, among a few other things.

I detailed my experiences in my blog , if anyone is interested. I tried to be as detailed as possible :

http://blog.stardothosting.com/2011/08/08/varnish-caching-with-joomla/

Thanks!


From: Mitch Pirtle [mailto:mitch at spacemonkeylabs.com]
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 3:29 AM
To: Kevin
Cc: <varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org>
Subject: Re: neverending saga of varnish + joomla

On 07/ago/2011, at 22:42, "Kevin" <k at kevinkevin.com<mailto:k at kevinkevin.com>> wrote:

The problem is varnish is having a very very difficult time knowing when to pipe or pass the traffic to the backend webserver if a logged in session happens. It seems that unless you patch joomla to do its own internal checks and determine if a user is anonymous or not, and send a custom http header that varnish can read, there is no other real way to make varnish work with joomla.
Hi Kevin!

You can accomplish this by writing a Joomla plugin that does these things.
There are example plugins in the Joomla wiki (I'm loitering outside and don't have access right now, sorry!) and I believe there is a simple plugin example provided in the 1.5 distribution.

Essentially think of Joomla plugins as database triggers and stored procedures. When a specific event fires in the execution stack, any plugins for that event are fired as well.

Hope this helps,

-- Mitch
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