VCLI protocol - Scripting the CLI interface¶
The Varnish CLI has a few bells&whistles when used as an API.
First: vcli.h contains magic numbers.
Second: If you use varnishadm to connect to varnishd for API purposes, use the -p argument to get “pass” mode.
In “pass” mode, or with direct CLI connections (more below), the first line of responses is always exactly 13 bytes long, including the NL, and it contains two numbers: The status code and the count of bytes in the “body” of the response:
200␣19␣␣␣␣␣␣
PONG␣1613397488␣1.0
This makes parsing the response unambiguous, even in cases like this where the response does not end with a NL.
The varnishapi library contains functions to implement the basics of the CLI protocol, for more, see the vcli.h include file.
Local and remote CLI connections¶
The varnishd process receives the CLI commands via TCP connections
which require PSK authentication (see below), but which provide no secrecy.
“No secrecy” means that if you configure these TCP connections to run
across a network, anybody who can sniff packets can see your CLI
commands. If you need secrecy, use ssh to run varnishadm or
to tunnel the TCP connection.
By default varnishd binds to localhost and ask the kernel to
assign a random port number. The resulting listen address is
stored in the shared memory, where the varnishadm program finds it.
You can configure varnishd to listen to a specific address with
the -T argument, this will also be written to shared memory, so
varnishadm keeps working:
# Bind to internal network
varnishd -T 192.168.10.21:3245
You can also configure varnishd to actively open a TCP connection
to another “controller” program, with the -M argument.
Finally, when run in “debug mode” with the -d argument, varnishd
will stay in the foreground and turn stdin/stdout into a CLI connection.
Authentication CLI connections¶
CLI connections to varnishd are authenticated with a “pre-shared-key”
authentication scheme, where the other end must prove they know
the contents of the secret file varnishd uses.
They do not have to read the precise same file on that specific computer, they could read an entirely different file on a different computer or fetch the secret from a server.
The name of the file can be configured with the -S option, and
varnishd records the name in shared memory, so varnishadm
can find it.
As a bare minimum varnishd needs to be able to read the file,
but other than that, it can be restricted any way you want.
Since it is not the file, but only the content of it that matter, you can make the file unreadable by everybody, and instead place a copy of the file in the home directories of the authorized users.
The file is read only at the moment when the auth CLI command is issued and the contents is not cached in varnishd, so you can change it as often as you want.
An authenticated session looks like this:
critter phk> telnet localhost 1234
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
107 59
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
Authentication required.
auth 455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
200 279
-----------------------------
Varnish Cache CLI 1.0
-----------------------------
FreeBSD,13.0-CURRENT,amd64,-jnone,-sdefault,-sdefault,-hcritbit
varnish-trunk revision 89a558e56390d425c52732a6c94087eec9083115
Type 'help' for command list.
Type 'quit' to close CLI session.
Type 'start' to launch worker process.
The CLI status of 107 indicates that authentication is necessary. The first 32 characters of the response text is the challenge “ixsl…mpg”. The challenge is randomly generated for each CLI connection, and changes each time a 107 is emitted.
The most recently emitted challenge must be used for calculating the authenticator “455c…c89a”.
The authenticator is calculated by applying the SHA256 function to the following byte sequence:
Challenge string
Newline (0x0a) character.
Contents of the secret file
Challenge string
Newline (0x0a) character.
and dumping the resulting digest in lower-case hex.
In the above example, the secret file contains foo\n and thus:
critter phk> hexdump secret
00000000 66 6f 6f 0a |foo.|
00000004
critter phk> cat > tmpfile
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
foo
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
^D
critter phk> hexdump -C tmpfile
00000000 69 78 73 6c 76 76 78 72 67 6b 6a 70 74 78 6d 63 |ixslvvxrgkjptxmc|
00000010 67 6e 6e 73 64 78 73 76 64 6d 76 66 79 6d 70 67 |gnnsdxsvdmvfympg|
00000020 0a 66 6f 6f 0a 69 78 73 6c 76 76 78 72 67 6b 6a |.foo.ixslvvxrgkj|
00000030 70 74 78 6d 63 67 6e 6e 73 64 78 73 76 64 6d 76 |ptxmcgnnsdxsvdmv|
00000040 66 79 6d 70 67 0a |fympg.|
00000046
critter phk> sha256 tmpfile
SHA256 (tmpfile) = 455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
critter phk> openssl dgst -sha256 < tmpfile
455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
The sourcefile lib/libvarnish/cli_auth.c contains a useful function which calculates the response, given an open filedescriptor to the secret file, and the challenge string.