How to Install Varnish 4 on CentOS 6 / CentOS 7

Varnish is an open source web accelerator typically run in front of web servers such as Apache or Nginx. It is also known as HTTP reverse proxy and designed to serve static content, such as images, stylesheets or scripts. Varnish will keep copies of pages from page revisit the same web server ( Apache or Nginx ) and re-use the cached copy for subsequent requests. This will help dynamic website such as wordpress or joomla improve in website response times and also will reduce the server load.

Varnish is also can be downloaded from EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) package repositories but the new major versions will not hit EPEL and it is not necessarily up to date. The following steps will describe how we can install Varnish 4 on CentOS 6 and CentOS 7.

Install Varnish 4 on CentOS 6 :

1. Prepare varnish repository :

# rpm -Uvh http://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/varnish-4.0/el6/noarch/varnish-release/varnish-release-4.0-4.el6.noarch.rpm

2. Prepare EPEL repository :

# rpm --import https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

3. Install Varnish :

# yum install varnish -y

4. Start varnish and make varnish start at boot :

# service varnish start
# chkconfig varnish on

Install Varnish 4 on CentOS 7 :

1. Prepare EPEL repository :

# rpm --import https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7
# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm

Or alternatively you can install by using yum command :

# sudo yum install epel-release -y

2. Install Varnish :

# sudo yum install varnish -y

3. Start varnish and make varnish start at boot :

# sudo systemctl start varnish.service
# sudo systemctl enable varnish.service