How to Install and configure Varnish in Ubuntu 16.04

Hi,

Since Varnish does not support SSL termination, you will need to configure nginx to do so, forward requests to Varnish, which would then forward them back to nginx over HTTP. Follow this tutorial with a few adjustments:

1. Use the following instructions to install Varnish: https://packagecloud.io/varnishcache/varnish41/install#manual-deb replacing trusty with xenial (16.04)

2. Configure the backend like so:

backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8080";
}

3. Replace DAEMON_OPTS="-a :6081 \ with ``DAEMON_OPTS="-a 127.0.0.1:6081 `.

Once you’ve done that, you will have Varnish configured to listen locally on port 6081 and proxy requests to 127.0.0.1:8080. Now, you’ll need to (1) move your existing nginx configuration to 127.0.0.1:8080, and (2) configure a new virtual host that handles SSL termination.

(2) is also part of the tutorial that I linked. Make sure you set proxy_pass to http://127.0.0.1:6081;. Finally, go into your existing virtual host, remove the SSL bits, and configure it to listen on 127.0.0.1:8080 like so:

server {
    listen 127.0.0.1:80;
    server_name your_domain_name;
    ...
}

Restart nginx and you should be able to browse to https://yourdomain with everything working properly.