Flushing just the homepage cache in Varnish

Question

I currently run nginx with Varnish in front on my Magento instance. I use Turpentine as the Varnish module for Magento. Without clearing the entire Varnish cache, is it possible just to flush the homepage cache?

Answer 1

Not through Turpentine, but you can run this command (as root/sudo) to flush just the homepage (may need to adjust if Magento is not installed at the top level of your site):

varnishadm ban.url '^/(?:index\.php/?)?$'

Answer 2

There is no page in the module by default. Though, you could create your own page in the admin with a form to submit an URL.

Within the controller you only need a few lines of code to actually ban a URL from the Varnish cache.

$sockets = Mage::helper( 'turpentine/varnish' )->getSockets();
foreach($sockets  as $socket) {
   $socket->ban( 'req.http.host', '==', '{host_name}', '&&', 'req.url', '==', '{path}');
}