Install guide on Varnish Cache

Docker install guide

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This install guide explains how to deploy Varnish Cache using the official Docker container.

Pull the Varnish docker image

First pull the Docker image from the Docker hub to ensure you have the latest version:

docker pull varnish

This command will implicitly use the latest tag to get the right version of the container. You can pin a specific version by adding one of the available tags.

Here’s an example where we explicitly pull version 8.0 of Varnish Cache:

Kubernetes install guide

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This install guide explains how to deploy Varnish Cache on Kubernetes using the official Helm chart.

Install the Helm chart

You can install the Heml chart on your Kubernetes cluster by running the following helm install command:

helm install varnish oci://docker.io/varnish/varnish-cache

This command will deploy Varnish on the Kubernetes cluster that was configured in the active context of your kubectl client. Run kubectl config current-context to see what that context is.

Debian and Ubuntu install guide

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This install guide explains how to install Varnish Cache on DEB-based Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu.

Register the package repository

Before we can install Varnish, we need to register the right package repository, otherwise Debian will install its own version of Varnish.

First update your packages:

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https curl gpg

Import Varnish Repo Signing keys

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
curl -Ls https://packages.varnish-software.com/varnish/varnish.pub.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/varnish.gpg > /dev/null

Add the correct source list based on /etc/os-release

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and compatible distributions install guide

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This install guide explains how to install Varnish Cache on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and rhel-compatible distributions like Alma Linux, and Rocky Linux.

Register the package repository

Create a file /etc/yum-repos.d/varnish.repo with the following content, if you run AmazonLinux replace el with amazonlinux

[varnish]
name=varnish
baseurl=https://packages.varnish-software.com/varnish/el/$releasever/$basearch
repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=https://packages.varnish-software.com/varnish/varnish.pub.asc
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Install Varnish

Now that the repository is registered, you can install Varnish by running the following command:

sudo yum install varnish

Configure Varnish

After installing Varnish, you will need to configure some varnishd runtime parameters, and possibly edit your VCL configuration.