How do I access Varnish admin area?

Question

This is a stupid question, sorry... I have tried googling and to no avail.

I thought it would just be visiting example.com:6082 but that doesn't seem to load anything.

# # Telnet admin interface listen address and port
VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_PORT=6082

Also, as a side question (I'm still working on getting it working), will varnish cache ANY file type, even if it's an RSS feed or a .php file or anything?

Answer 1

Varnish doesn't have an admin area. The admin port is for the CLI varnishadm tool. It will normally pick up the port automatically. You can also use the admin port to connect to Varnish from custom tools and issue admin commands.

Check out the docs for the varnishadm tool. Here's an example of specifying the port:

varnishadm -T localhost:6028

There is a tool called the VAC (Varnish Administration Console) that provides a web based admin console, but it's quite expensive, and is part of Varnish Plus.

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As for the other part of your question, Varnish will cache anything it thinks is safe to cache. It doesn't look so much at file types, but more at HTTP headers. If the user sends cookies for example, Varnish won't cache the page by default as the cookies may indicate the user is on a dynamic page. Varnish also only caches GET requests by default.

Check out the default vcl. For version 3:

sub vcl_recv {
    if (req.restarts == 0) {
        if (req.http.x-forwarded-for) {
            set req.http.X-Forwarded-For =
                req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip;
        } else {
            set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;
        }
    }
    if (req.request != "GET" &&
      req.request != "HEAD" &&
      req.request != "PUT" &&
      req.request != "POST" &&
      req.request != "TRACE" &&
      req.request != "OPTIONS" &&
      req.request != "DELETE") {
        /* Non-RFC2616 or CONNECT which is weird. */
        return (pipe);
    }
    if (req.request != "GET" && req.request != "HEAD") {
        /* We only deal with GET and HEAD by default */
        return (pass);
    }
    if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Cookie) {
        /* Not cacheable by default */
        return (pass);
    }
    return (lookup);
}