Discourse behind Varnish?

Product Support Self-hosting
2

I have it working very well - as far as I can see Discourse behaves well towards Varnish and you can aggressively cache everything under the /assets directory.

 backend discourse {
     .host = "x.x.x.x";
     .port = "81";
 }

sub vcl_recv {

        if (req.http.host == "forum.myhost.org.uk") {
                set req.backend = discourse;
        }

        if (req.http.host == "forum.myhost.org.uk") {
                if (req.url ~ "^/assets") {
                        return(lookup);
                } else {
                        return(pipe);
                }
        }

Obviously there is more in my varnish config, but that is the basic / cache specific bit. I proxy through Apache, so in the virtual host have something like this:

 <LocationMatch "^/assets/.*$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age = 3600"
 </LocationMatch>

In my setup, the max-age is used to tell varnish to cache, though different cache headings can be used.

There might be a few other things that can be safely cached (comments anyone?) though the above seems to work great.

It takes load off Apache, on which I run mod_security so the stack is both fast and pretty secure :smile: )

Enjoy…