Upgrading to Varnish 5.0

Changes to VCL

  • All VCL Objects should now be defined before used

    • in particular, this is now required for ACLs. The error message for ACLs being used before being defined is confusing - see PR #2021:

      Name <acl> is a reserved name

  • VCL names are restricted to alphanumeric characters, dashes (-) and underscores (_). In addition, the first character should be alphabetic. That is, the name should match “[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_-]*”.

  • Like strings, backends and integers can now be used as boolean expressions in if statements. See vcl(7) for details.

  • Add support to perform matches in assignments, obtaining a boolean as result:

    set req.http.foo = req.http.bar ~ "bar";

  • Returned values from functions and methods’ calls can be thrown away.

backends

  • Added support for the PROXY protocol via .proxy_header attribute. Possible values are 1 and 2, corresponding to the PROXY protocol version 1 and 2, respectively.

vcl_recv

  • Added return (vcl(label)) to switch to the VCL labelled label.

  • The rollback function has been retired.

vcl_hit

  • Replace return (fetch) with return (miss).

vcl_backend_*

  • Added read access to remote.ip, client.ip, local.ip and server.ip.

vcl_backend_fetch

  • Added write access to bereq.body, the request body. Only unset is supported at this time.

  • We now send request bodies by default (see Request Body sent always / “cacheable POST”). To keep the previous behaviour add the following code before any return (..) statement in this subroutine:

    if (bereq.method == "GET") {
    unset bereq.body;
}

vcl_backend_error

  • Added write access to beresp.body, the response body. This may replace synthetic() in future releases.

vcl_deliver

  • Added read access to obj.ttl, obj.age, obj.grace and obj.keep.

vcl_synth

  • Added write access to resp.body, the response body. This may replace synthetic() in future releases.

Management interface

  • To disable CLI authentication use -S none.

  • n_waitinglist statistic removed.

Changes to parameters

  • Added ban_lurker_holdoff.

  • Removed session_max. This parameter actually had no effect since 4.0 but might come back in a future release.

  • vcl_path is now a colon-separated list of directories, replacing vcl_dir.

  • vmod_path is now a colon-separated list of directories, replacing vmod_dir.

Other changes

  • varnishstat(1) -f option accepts a glob(7) pattern.

  • Cache-Control and Expires headers for uncacheable requests (i.e. passes) will not be parsed. As a result, the RFC variant of the TTL VSL tag is no longer logged.