systemd and varnish on Ubuntu 16.04

Apr 6, 2017

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I recently had the opportunity to work on a Ubuntu 16.04 system with systemd and varnish. I’m not a huge fan of systemd as I’m not convinced that it’s solving any problems that I had with SysV init and it makes my work more difficult as it’s not as straight forward.

The problem that I had was getting varnish to listen on a port other than the default of 6081. Ubuntu would traditionally use /etc/default/varnish to make any configuration changes related to startup and that file exists on Ubuntu 16.04 but it is not used. There is a file in /etc/systemd/system/varnish.service that is used to set startup options and can be used to reconfigure the startup ports.

# /etc/systemd/system/varnish.service
...
[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/run/varnishd.pid
LimitNOFILE=131072
LimitMEMLOCK=82000
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/varnishd -a :6081 -T 127.0.0.1:6082 -P /run/varnishd.pid -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl -S /etc/varnish/secret -s file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,256M
ExecReload=/usr/share/varnish/reload-vcl
...

Once that file has been modified, you then need to issue a systemctl daemon-reload command to get the new settings loaded into systemd.

systemctl daemon-reload

Once that is done, restart varnish using systemctl.

systemctl restart varnish.service

Comments

2 responses to “systemd and varnish on Ubuntu 16.04”

RG

March 27, 2018

I’m shocked that this is STILL unresolved. I installed Varnish 4, 5 and finally 6 on xenial in attempts to find a properly working version, to no avail.

Does the bug affect just the listening port in your experience? No other VCL directives are affected, right?

Thx
Josh

March 27, 2018

Hi RG,

I haven’t run into any further issues I’ve had to work around here but I do assume it applies to all parameters defined or used in “/etc/systemd/system/varnish.service”.

Best,
Josh

systemd and varnish on Ubuntu 16.04

Comments

2 responses to “systemd and varnish on Ubuntu 16.04”

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