Ansible Role: Varnish

An Ansible Role that installs Varnish on RedHat/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Requirements

Requires the EPEL repository on RedHat/CentOS (you can install it using the geerlingguy.repo-epel role).

Role Variables

Available variables are listed below, along with default values (see defaults/main.yml):

varnish_version: "4.0"

Varnish version that should be installed. See https://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/ for a listing of available versions (e.g. 3.0, 4.0, 4.1).

varnish_config_path: /etc/varnish

The path in which Varnish configuration files will be stored.

varnish_use_default_vcl: true

Whether to use the included (simplistic) default Varnish VCL, using the backend host/port defined with the next two variables. Set this to false and copy your own default.vcl file into the varnish_config_path if you'd like to use a more complicated setup. If this variable is set to true, all other configuration will be taken from Varnish's own default VCL.

varnish_default_vcl_template_path: default.vcl.j2

The default VCL file to be copied (if varnish_use_default_vcl is true). Defaults the the simple template inside templates/default.vcl.j2. This path should be relative to the directory from which you run your playbook.

varnish_default_backend_host: "127.0.0.1"
varnish_default_backend_port: "8080"

Some settings for the default "default.vcl" template that will be copied to the varnish_config_path folder. The default backend host/port could be Apache or Nginx (or some other HTTP server) running on the same host or some other host (in which case, you might use port 80 instead).

varnish_listen_port: "80"

The port on which Varnish will listen (typically port 80).

varnish_secret: "14bac2e6-1e34-4770-8078-974373b76c90"

The secret/key to be used for connecting to Varnish's admin backend (for purge requests, etc.).

varnish_admin_listen_host: "127.0.0.1"
varnish_admin_listen_port: "6082"

The host and port through which Varnish will accept admin requests (like purge and status requests).

varnish_storage: "file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,256M"

How Varnish stores cache entries (this is passed in as the argument for -s). If you want to use in-memory storage, change to something like malloc,256M. Please read Varnish's Getting Started guide for more information.

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: webservers
  vars_files:
    - vars/main.yml
  roles:
    - role: geerlingguy.varnish

Inside vars/main.yml:

varnish_secret: "[secret generated by uuidgen]"
varnish_default_backend_host: 81
... etc ...

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This role was created in 2014 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.