Jan 15 2015

Redirecting varnish to new backend on the fly

By • Scripts, Varnish • 0

This specific content was written 10 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

varnishCache1) Change VCL backend config

Go to your vcl file (in my case /etc/varnish/default.vcl). Edit the backend param to point to another server. Also increase the timeouts since it will take longer than accessing localhost.

backend default {
 .host = "backupserver.org";
 .port = "80";
 .connect_timeout = 120s;
 .first_byte_timeout = 600s;
 .between_bytes_timeout = 60s;
}

2) Validate VCL script on the fly

sudo varnishd -C -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl

This will notify if any syntax issues exist.

 

3) Reload the VCL Script without restarting varnish

I utilized:

$varnishadm -T localhost:6082
vcl.load reload01 /etc/varnish/default.vcl 
vcl.use reload01

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