Author

Dridi Boukelmoune

Date

2013-04-25

Version

0.1

Manual section

3

With this module, you can make Varnish serve static files from your file system without an additional server such as Apache HTTPD. The module actually starts a server thread that will answer Varnish's HTTP requests with static files.

This is a play with Linux system calls and Varnish internals Proof of Concept VMOD. Do I need to mention this is not suitable for production use ? You are warned ;)

In order to build and run the VMOD, you will need:

• Varnish 4 (just in case ;-)
• libmagic

Do not hesitate to report any missing dependency.

This VMOD was initially an attempt to create a filesystem director, in order to test backends manipulation (more precisely directors) introduced by Varnish 4.

Obviously, it failed, but instead of creating a director, I use a backend declared in the VCL and create a server thread with the backend's parameters. By the way, I try to reuse Varnish's code instead of writing my own for several reasons:

• developer => lazy
• it forces me to read and understand lots of code written by experienced C developers

There is a strong probability that the director attempt failed because I didn't use Varnish's internals properly. You can read the commit log to know the steps I go through while writing it, I'm still playing with it when I want to try stuff.

This is very easy to use:

import fsdirector;

backend static {
   .host = "127.0.0.1";
   .port = "8080";
}

sub vcl_init {
   new fs = fsdirector.file_system(static, "/var/www");
}

See src/tests for more examples.

This document is licensed under the same license as the libvmod-fsdirector project. See LICENSE for details.

• Copyright (c) 2013 Dridi Boukelmoune