Best practice for SSL passthrough?

[Mattias Geniar]

> We're building a varnish cache to put on a separate machine in front
of a site that uses both http and https. 
> Varnish is of course only supposed to cache http requests, but what is
the best practice to 
> pass https through to the backend? I'm thinking about putting a
separate varnish instance 
> up on port 443 that does a pipe on all requests.

We're actually a pretty big fan of running Nginx on port 443 for our SSL
(so let Nginx encrypt all traffic), and let it talk to the backend port
80 (your varnish) as a proxy configuration.

If I'm not mistaken, that's how varnish-cache.org works as well.

With Nginx you can pass some extra headers to your backend as well, so
you can differentiate between HTTP and HTTPs traffic.

Regards,
Mattias