Skip to content
Logo Theodo

Warming up Varnish4 cache

Raphaël Dubigny2 min read

Caching data with varnish allows to deal with heavy data traffic at a limited cost.

The question is, how can I serve fresh data even if no one have requested them recently? The solution is to request your cache regularly.

This is how I managed to auto warm up a list of URLs in my varnish cache every hour.

First, I add the urls I want refreshed in a urls.txt file like this:

/dashboard/1
/dashboard/2
/dashboard/3

Note that this url list is static but you can easily feed it automatically with a background job of yours.

Then, I need to add specific code to my config.vcl file:

acl warmuper_ip {
    "10.20.30.40";
}

sub vcl_recv {
    # the script varnish-cache-warmup.sh must always refresh the cache
    if (client.ip ~ warmuper_ip && req.http.Cache-Control ~ "no-cache") {
        set req.hash_always_miss = true;
    }
}

Then, I create a varnish-cache-warmup.sh script to actually warmup the varnish cache:

#!/bin/bash
wget --output-document=/dev/null --header='Cache-Control: no-cache' --tries=1 --quiet --base=http://domain.com --input-file=/path/to/urls.txt

In order to test your script you’ll have to look at varnish logs. Here is a command that may help varnishlog -c | grep ReqURL.

Eventually, I add this cron task with crontab -e:

0 * * * * cd /path/to/varnish-cache-warmup.sh

And that is it!

Here are some helpful resources:

Raphaël Dubigny

Raphaël Dubigny

Web Developer at Theodo

Theodo France

Liked this article?