The Varnish Developers Guide on Varnish Cache

Bundling VMODs with the Varnish distribution

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Decisions about whether to add a new Varnish module (VMOD) to those bundled with Varnish are guided by these criteria.

The VMOD is known to be in widespread use and in high demand for common use cases.
Or, if the VMOD is relatively new, it provides compelling features that the developer group agrees will be a valuable enhancement for the project.
The VMOD does not create dependencies on additional external libraries. VMODs that are “glue” for a library come from third parties.
- We don’t want to add new burdens of dependency and compatibility to the project.
- We don’t want to force Varnish deployments to install more than admins explicitly choose to install.
The VMOD code follows project conventions (passes make distcheck, follows source code style, and so forth).
- A pull request can demonstrate that this is the case (after any necessary fixups).
The developer group commits to maintaining the code for the long run (so there will have to be a consensus that we’re comfortable with it).

How our website works

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The principle of eating your own dogfood is important for software quality, that is how you experience what your users are dealing with, and I am not the least ashamed to admit that several obvious improvements have happened to Varnish as a result of running the project webserver.

But it is also important to externalize what you learn doing so, and therefore I thought I would document here how the projects new “internal IT” works.

How to contribute content to varnish-cache.org

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is where we walk you through the mechanics of adding content to varnish-cache.org (see phk’s note homepage_dogfood for an insight into the innards of site).

Git Repository

The web site contents live in github at:

https://github.com/varnishcache/homepage

To offer your own contribution, fork the project and send us a pull request.

Sphinx and RST

The web site sources are written in RST – reStructuredText, the documentation format originally conceived for Python (and also used in the Varnish distribution, as well as for formatting VMOD docs). Sphinx is used to render web pages from the RST sources.

Who is ... ?

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Not quite Twurp’s Peerage but a Who’s Who of the Varnish Cache project.

Anders Berg

Blame Anders! He is the one who got the crazy idea that the world needed another HTTP proxy server software, and convinced his employer, the norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang to pay for the first version to be developed.

Here is an interview with Anders about how it all began

Dag-Erling Smørgrav

DES was working at Redpill-Linpro, a norwegian UNIX/Open Source company when Anders floated his idea for a “forward HTTP cache”, he lured PHK into joining, was one of the original developers (doing Linux), project manager and release engineer for the first three years of the project, and forced us to adopt a non-US-ASCII charset from the start.