Stripping out select querystring attribute/value pairs so varnish will not vary cache by them

runamok picture runamok · Oct 30, 2012 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

My goal is to "whitelist" certain querystring attributes and their values so varnish will not vary cache between the urls.

Example:

Url 1: http://foo.com/someproduct.html?utm_code=google&type=hello  
Url 2: http://foo.com/someproduct.html?utm_code=yahoo&type=hello  
Url 3: http://foo.com/someproduct.html?utm_code=yahoo&type=goodbye

In the above example I want to whitelist "utm_code" but not "type" So after the first url is hit I want varnish to serve that cached content to the second url.

However, in the case of the third url, the attribute "type" value is different so that should be a varnish cache miss.

I have tried the 2 methods below (found on a drupal help article I can't locate right now) that did not seem to work. Might be because I have the regex wrong.

# 1. strip out certain querystring values so varnish does not vary cache.
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "([\?|&])utm_(campaign|content|medium|source|term)=[^&\s]*&?", "\1");
# get rid of trailing & or ?
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "[\?|&]+$", "");

# 2. strip out certain querystring values so varnish does not vary cache.
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "([\?|&])utm_campaign=[^&\s]*&?", "\1");
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "([\?|&])foo_bar=[^&\s]*&?", "\1");
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "([\?|&])bar_baz=[^&\s]*&?", "\1");
# get rid of trailing & or ?
set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "[\?|&]+$", "");

Answer

runamok picture runamok · Dec 14, 2012

I figured this out and wanted to share. I found this code that makes a subroutine that does what I need.

sub vcl_recv {

    # strip out certain querystring params that varnish should not vary cache by
    call normalize_req_url;

    # snip a bunch of other code
}

sub normalize_req_url {

    # Strip out Google Analytics campaign variables. They are only needed
    # by the javascript running on the page
    # utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, gclid, ...
    if(req.url ~ "(\?|&)(gclid|cx|ie|cof|siteurl|zanpid|origin|utm_[a-z]+|mr:[A-z]+)=") {
        set req.url = regsuball(req.url, "(gclid|cx|ie|cof|siteurl|zanpid|origin|utm_[a-z]+|mr:[A-z]+)=[%.-_A-z0-9]+&?", "");
    }
    set req.url = regsub(req.url, "(\?&?)$", "");
}