nginx-varnish-ci

Preconditions

A simple Docker configuration of a web-server Nginx interacting with Varnish cache. A Varnish container exposes a port "80" outside and listens incoming connections (from a browser). A Nginx container contains only an internal port "80" to listen Varnish connections.

server URLs

http://www.nginx-varnish.ci/

http://nginx-varnish.ci/

Sample pages

http://www.nginx-varnish.ci/index.html

http://www.nginx-varnish.ci/page.html

http://www.nginx-varnish.ci/errors/404.html

http://www.nginx-varnish.ci/errors/50x.html

Managing a Docker container

Running a container

docker-compose up --build

List all running containers

docker ps

Entering a container

docker exec -it nginx-varnish-ci-www-data-1 bash

Exiting a container

exit

Shutting down a container

docker-compose down --remove-orphans

Verify Varnish is working

Check a page content

Enter a website URL or a page URL. Check a page is properly rendered according to an HTML-template. The page shall contain a Title at a head and a Header at a body.

Check headers

Inspect a page. The page should contain following response headers:

• Server: nginx/1.21.6
• Via: 1.1 varnish (Varnish/7.1)
• X-Varnish: 2

After reloading the page a varnish header should change a value:

• X-Varnish: 32770

Check Access Log

Reload a page several times. A file /var/log/nginx/access.log should contain only one record. This means after a first visit Varnish returns a cached page without any requests to Nginx.

Check internal connections

Enter a container www-data:

docker exec -it nginx-varnish-ci-www-data-1 bash

Perform following curl-requests:

curl -i varnish.nginx-varnish.ci
curl -i www-data.nginx-varnish.ci

Note that headers received from the both networks are different: