How to configure Varnish VCL file for caching OSCommerce site?

Question

I'm building a simple server setup for developping purposes, with Nginx, PHP-FPM, APC, Varnish and MySQL, using Ubuntu Server 12.04.

But now I want to deploy at this testing environment, an OSCommerce app. After some googling I couldn't find a way to properly configure OSCommerce with Varnish.

Actually I have Varnish configured for Wordpress (varnish file and default.vcl file) like one from there (GitHub-Nicolargo) but just a little bit modded.

So, should I use the same configuration for WP? If not, There's someone who knows how (or where should I find) to configure it properly for OSCommerce?

Hugs

Answer 1

Configuring Varnish for Open Source models such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or OSCommerce is tricky: you can have a default VCL that works just fine in 50% of the cases, but as soon as extra modules are activated in the CMS, the caching stops working. That's because each module can alter cookies, caching-headers, ...

That pretty much makes each Varnish implementation a custom job: you can start from a basic VCL that works for the base CMS, but it'll require finetuning specific to that site.

I would therefore recommend starting with a basic VCL file, such as the one you linked or that you can find here. Afterwards, it's a matter of running varnishlog/varnishhist/varnishstat to find out which pages are not getting cached, determining why (a combination of cookies/headers/invalid VCL) and modifying the appropriate VCL file(s).

I know it's not the answer you were looking for directly, but if you could post some output of varnishlog where a request that -should- be cached is -not- being cached, we could take it from there.