Varnish is a web application accelerator. It redirects the visitors to static pages whenever it is possible. Varnish can be installed and configured to cache the content in front of any HTTP server and it can speed up the delivery up to 300-1000 times.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to increase the loading speed of your WordPress site by setting up Varnish in front of Nginx on an Ubuntu 16.04 server. We assume that you already have LEMP stack (Nginx, MySQL, and PHP) and WordPress installed on your Ubuntu 16.04 server.
Requirements
For this setup to work, you’ll need:
- An Ubuntu 16.04 VPS. Preferably SSD so it’s faster.
- A LEMP stack and WordPress installed on your server.
- A root user.
- A text editor.
This tutorial is for WordPress with Varnish and Nginx. If you want to use a different setup, follow our tutorial: Install WordPress with Memcached and Nginx on Ubuntu.
Log in to your server via SSH as user root
ssh root@IP_ADDRESS -p PORT_NUMBER
and make sure that all packages installed on your server are up to date
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Install and configure Varnish
Varnish is available in the official Ubuntu 16.04 repository, so we can easily install it using the apt-get command
apt-get install varnish
Once it is installed, we will configure Varnish to listen on port 80 and use the Nginx web server which will be listening on port 8080 as a backend.
Open the /etc/default/varnish file in a text editor
vi /etc/default/varnish
and do the following changes in the ‘## Alternative 2, Configuration with VCL’ section of the file
DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 -T localhost:6082 -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl -S /etc/varnish/secret -s malloc,256m"
Edit the varnish.service file as well, and append the following configuration options:
systemctl edit varnish.service ExecStart=/usr/sbin/varnishd -j unix,user=vcache -F -a :80 -T localhost:6082 -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl -S /etc/varnish/secret -s malloc,256m
Save the file and reload the changes
systemctl daemon-reload
Next, edit the default Varnish vcl file
vi /etc/varnish/default.vcl
and make sure that the following blocks look like the ones below
backend default {
.host = "127.0.0.1";
.port = "8080";
}
sub vcl_recv {
if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
unset req.http.cookie;
}
}
sub vcl_fetch {
if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) {
unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
}
}
save the changes and restart Varnish for the changes to take effect
systemctl restart varnish
Configure Nginx
Open the Nginx configuration file of your WordPress site
vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourdomain.conf
and change the listening port to 8080
server {
...
listen 8080;
...
}
Make the same changes in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file too.
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Save the changes and test the Nginx configuration by executing the following command
nginx -t
The output should look like this
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
and finally, restart Nginx for the changes to take effect
systemctl restart nginx
Now once you access your website in a browser, it should be served through Varnish. And that’s it. You’ve successfully configured WordPress with Varnish and Nginx. Your WordPress site should be noticeably faster now. If you want to further speed up your site, follow our instructions here or get a quality, fast SSD VPS.
After you’ve configured everything, you can move onto securing your WordPress and securing your LEMP stack.
Of course, if you are one of our WordPress Hosting customers, you don’t have to do any of this, simply ask our admins, sit back and relax. Our admins will set this up for you immediately.
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