Using Varnish with multiple vhosts

Question

I have varnish configured and "working" on port 80. I have apache running a few instances of Drupal 6 on port 8080. One for dev, review and one for production. I used the four kitchens vcl file as a guide in setting things up. But I'm wondering if I need to do more configuration in the VCL to separate these environments? Perhaps separate backends? I'm not sure when this is necessary.

In addition to this, I am not getting any (or very few) hits, mostly misses which indicates something isn't working correctly.

For reference, my vhosts looks like this...

NameVirtualHost *:8080
<VirtualHost *:8080>
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        ServerName www.mysite.com
        ServerAlias mysite.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/prod/httpdocs
        ErrorLog /var/www/logs/prod_error.log
        CustomLog /var/www/logs/prod_access.log combined

        <directory "/var/www/prod/httpdocs/">
                Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </directory>

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:8080>
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        ServerName test.mysite.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/test/httpdocs
        ErrorLog /var/www/logs/test_error.log
        CustomLog /var/www/logs/test_access.log combined

        <directory "/var/www/test/httpdocs/">
                Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </directory>

</VirtualHost>

Feel free to call out anything else you see wrong with how I have configured things in apache.

Additionally, what can I do if I want my dev environment to skip caching all together?

Thanks

Answer 1

You may setup different VCL configurations for your environments.

It can be easily done with wrapping them by host condition:

sub vcl_recv {
if (req.http.Host ~ "^example.com")
 {
 ...
  if (req.url ~ "^/something") {
   return(pass);
  }
 ...
}
}

Please, take a look on my blog post http://blog.tenya.me/blog/2011/12/19/varnish-simple-virtual-hosts/, it describes how to do configuration separation.