How to Configure Varnish for Shopware 5

Shopware 5 applications can greatly benefit from Varnish caching. On the client side, pages load faster, while on the server side, the load decreases.

The Hypernode platform supports Varnish as a caching layer and configuration is actually quite simple.

Step One: Enable Varnish on the Hypernode

Varnish can be enabled with a simple command using the hypernode-systemctl CLI:

hypernode-systemctl settings varnish_enabled True

Step Two: Enable Varnish for NGINX Vhost

The hypernode-manage-vhosts (HMV) config allows you to enable varnish for every vhost individually. So if you for example have a domain example.com. You should create 2 vhosts:

example.com
www.example.com

hypernode-manage-vhosts example.com www.example.com --type shopware5 --varnish

Step Three: Follow Shopware’s Varnish Configuration Documentation

Please follow Shopware’s documentation about configuring Shopware 5 to work with Varnish. You can skip the step about configuring Varnish, we’ll take you through that :-).

Step Four: Implement Shopware’s Varnish configuration

Copy the VCL configuration from Shopware’s documentation and save it on your Hypernode, for example at /data/web/shopware5.vcl.

Note: If you are using a cluster setup, you need to add some additional configuration to your vcl. The acl purgers block inside your vcl should contain the private ip range of your cluster. You can find your private ip range using the hypernode-cluster-info command on one of your cluster nodes.

As example, our private ip range is 192.168.1.0/24. You can add this to the acl purgers block. It should like something similar as the example below:

acl purgers {
    "127.0.0.1";
    "localhost";
    "::1";
    "192.168.1.0/24";
}

Now we can load in the configuration with the following command:

varnishadm vcl.load shopware5_debug /data/web/shopware5.vcl

After that, we can start using the configuration with the following command:

varnishadm vcl.use shopware5_debug

Step Five: Verify the Varnish configuration

Go to your site and open the inspector to check the response headers of your page. You should see the following headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 10:45:18 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 162
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://appname.hypernode.io/
x-url: /
X-Cacheable: YES
X-Varnish: 35225 67815
Age: 17
Via: 1.1 varnish-v4
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1

If your page is not in the cache yet, X-Cache should contain ‘MISS’ and X-Cache-Hits should contain ‘0’. Otherwise, X-Cache should contain ‘HIT’ and X-Cache-Hits should increment each time you visit the page again.

Step Six: Removing verification headers from Varnish configuration

While the X-Cache and X-Cache-Hits headers are very useful, it is a good practice to disable these headers after you don’t need them anymore. You can disable these headers by prefixing the configuration lines with the ‘#’ character, which comments the lines out. The lines in question (from /data/web/shopware5.vcl) are:

# Set a cache header to allow us to inspect the response headers during testing
if (obj.hits > 0) {
    unset resp.http.set-cookie;
    set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
}  else {
    set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
}

set resp.http.X-Cache-Hits = obj.hits;

Make it so that the lines look like the following:

# Set a cache header to allow us to inspect the response headers during testing
if (obj.hits > 0) {
    unset resp.http.set-cookie;
    #set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
}  else {
    #set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
}

#set resp.http.X-Cache-Hits = obj.hits;

Now, we need to reload the varnish configuration again. This can be done by loading it with a slightly different identifier:

varnishadm vcl.load shopware5 /data/web/shopware5.vcl

After that, we can use the new configuration with the following command:

varnishadm vcl.use shopware5

And that should be it! Please verify that your pages do not contain the X-Cache and X-Cache-Hits headers.