What is Varnish?

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 – 1000x, depending on your architecture.

Varnish is a tool in the Web Cache category of a tech Stack.
Varnish is an open source tool with 905 GitHub stars and 208 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Varnish’s open source repository on GitHub.

In this wiki we have gathered in one place the best community resources that we could find that you will need to start using Varnish. Let’s get you started from development to production!

Varnish is very flexible and as such can be used as a caching engine , a load balancer , a web application firewall, an edge authentication and authorization mechanism. Other use cases are HTTP routing, hotlinking protection, DDoS attack defender and, a lot, more.

Varnish is a reverse-proxy HTTP accelerator designed for heavily consumed API endpoints and also for dynamic, heavy-content, high-traffic websites. It is currently used by the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, Vimeo, Twitter, Tumblr, The Guardian, VG.no and many others. More than 2.5 million sites run the software.

Official varnish-cache.org