How to setup an ultra-fast CDN using Nginx and Varnish

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, there is a big chance to loose your site visitors and that is a risk we are dealing with today due to the big competition in the industry.

There are lots of reasons which effects on the site's speed. 

1. Large multimedia contents
2. DNS look up issue
3. Server response time 
4. Multiple redirects

are few from a lengthy list.

If you are using a good CDNs to serve contents, then that will give a good boost while loading the site. Last month I had to setup up Our own CDN for WSO2 Oxygentank Developer Portal and i'm trying to summaries steps that I followed.

Installing Nginx and varnish

1. apt-get install nginx
2. apt-get install varnish

Nginx Config

• (/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default)server {
         open_file_cache_valid 20m;
          listen 81;
          server_name mydomain.com;
          access_log   /var/log/cdn/mydomain.com/logs/access.log;
          root   /cdn_document_path/;
  
          location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|wmv|avi|mpg|mpeg|mp4|htm|html|js|css|mp3|swf|ico|flv)$ {
                          open_file_cache_valid 120m;
                          expires 7d;
                          open_file_cache max=1000 inactive=20s
          }
         
           location = /50x.html {
                          root   /var/www/nginx-default;
          }
  
          # No access to .htaccess files.
          location ~ /\.ht {
              deny  all;
          }
  }

Varnish Config

• (/etc/default/varnish)START=yes
  NFILES=131072
  MEMLOCK=82000
  INSTANCE=$(uname -n)
  DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
               -T localhost:6082 \
               -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
               -S /etc/varnish/secret \
               -s file,/var/lib/varnish/$INSTANCE/varnish_storage.bin,1G"
• (/etc/varnish/default.vcl)backend default {
      .host = "127.0.0.1";
      .port = "81";
  }
  
  sub vcl_recv {
  if (req.url ~ “\.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|gz|tgz|bz2|tbz|mp3|ogg|swf)$”) {
  return (lookup);
  }
  }
  
  sub vcl_fetch {
  if (req.url ~ “\.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|gz|tgz|bz2|tbz|mp3|ogg|swf)$”) {
  unset obj.http.set-cookie;
  }
  }

Start Nginx and Varnish

1. /etc/init.d/nginx start
2. /etc/init.d/varnish restart

Once you start Nginx and Varnish. Varnish will start to server port 80 web traffic. If it is a static content varnish will server and nginx will look after all dynamic contents.