How to Configure Varnish for Shopware 6

Customers with Hypernode Pelican, Falcon (formerly known as Professional) and Eagle (formerly known as Excellence) plans can use Varnish to boost their shop. This article explains how you can configure Varnish for your Hypernode.

Although Varnish is extremely awesome when it get’s to speeding up websites, Varnish is a complex technique that needs some experience to set it up. We’d recommend to first test varnish on a staging environment or adevelopment plan before implementing varnish on a live node.

Step One: Enable Varnish on the Hypernode

You can enable varnish on the hypernode using the systemctl-tool by running:

hypernode-systemctl settings varnish_enabled True

Step Two: How to Setup Varnish for the 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

To enable varnish for these vhosts you can run the below command:

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

Please note: this should create 2 files in your nginx vhost environment. If this is not the case make sure you’ve 2 files in you vhost-config (/data/web/nginx/example.com). If not, you should make sure to have 2 files:

/data/web/nginx/example.com/public.shopware6.conf:

## Redirecting to varnish
location / {
    set $log_handler varnish;

    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6081;
    proxy_read_timeout 900s;  # equal to fastcgi_read_timeout at handlers.conf:16
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

/data/web/nginx/example.com/varnish.shopware6.conf:

root /data/web/public;

include /etc/nginx/handlers.conf;

index index.php index.html;

location /recovery/install {
    try_files $uri /recovery/install/index.php$is_args$args;
}

location /recovery/update/ {
    location /recovery/update/assets {}
    if (!-e $request_filename){
        rewrite . /recovery/update/index.php last;
    }
}

location / {
    try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
    echo_exec @phpfpm;
}

Step Three: Configure Shopware to work with Varnish

This step is only necessary if you’re on Shopware >= 6.4.

Go to Shopware’s Reverse Http Cache documentation to configure Shopware to take Varnish into account.

Step Four: Implement a .vcl Into Varnish

To actually use Varnish you need to implement a varnish config file, a .vcl. If you’re on Shopware >= 6.4, fetch the Varnish configuration from their documentation (copy the code block starting with vcl 4.0;). Or you can create your own.

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";
}

So, the steps to implement the Varnish configuration into Varnish are:

Create a file on your node, for example: data/web/shopware6.vcl with the Varnish config
Load the .vcl into Varnish: varnishadm vcl.load shopware6 /data/web/shopware6.vcl
Activate the loaded config, shopware6: varnishadm vcl.use shopware6

app@abcdef-example-magweb-cmbl:~$ varnishadm vcl.load shopware6 /data/web/shopware6.vcl
VCL compiled.
app@abcdef-example-magweb-cmbl:~$ varnishadm vcl.list
available  auto/cold          0 boot
available  auto/warm          0 shopware6
app@abcdef-example-magweb-cmbl:~$ varnishadm vcl.use shopware6
VCL 'shopware6' now active