Provided by: varnish_4.1.1-1ubuntu0.2_amd64 
NAME
varnish-cli - Varnish Command Line Interface
DESCRIPTION
Varnish as a command line interface (CLI) which can control and change most of the operational parameters
and the configuration of Varnish, without interrupting the running service.
The CLI can be used for the following tasks:
configuration
You can upload, change and delete VCL files from the CLI.
parameters
You can inspect and change the various parameters Varnish has available through the CLI. The
individual parameters are documented in the varnishd(1) man page.
bans Bans are filters that are applied to keep Varnish from serving stale content. When you issue a ban
Varnish will not serve any banned object from cache, but rather re-fetch it from its backend
servers.
process management
You can stop and start the cache (child) process though the CLI. You can also retrieve the latest
stack trace if the child process has crashed.
If you invoke varnishd(1) with -T, -M or -d the CLI will be available. In debug mode (-d) the CLI will be
in the foreground, with -T you can connect to it with varnishadm or telnet and with -M varnishd will
connect back to a listening service pushing the CLI to that service. Please see varnishd(1) for details.
Syntax
Commands are usually terminated with a newline. Long command can be entered using sh style here
documents. The format of here-documents is:
<< word
here document
word
word can be any continuous string chosen to make sure it doesn't appear naturally in the following here
document.
When using the here document style of input there are no restrictions on length. When using
newline-terminated commands maximum length is limited by the varnishd parameter cli_buffer.
When commands are newline terminated they get tokenized before parsing so if you have significant spaces
enclose your strings in double quotes. Within the quotes you can escape characters with \. The n, r and t
get translated to newlines, carriage returns and tabs. Double quotes themselves can be escaped with a
backslash.
To enter characters in octals use the \nnn syntax. Hexadecimals can be entered with the \xnn syntax.
Commands
help [<command>]
Show command/protocol help.
ping [<timestamp>]
Keep connection alive.
auth <response>
Authenticate.
quit Close connection.
banner Print welcome banner.
status Check status of Varnish cache process.
start Start the Varnish cache process.
stop Stop the Varnish cache process.
vcl.load <configname> <filename> [auto|cold|warm]
Compile and load the VCL file under the name provided.
vcl.inline <configname> <quoted_VCLstring> [auto|cold|warm]
Compile and load the VCL data under the name provided.
vcl.use <configname>
Switch to the named configuration immediately.
vcl.discard <configname>
Unload the named configuration (when possible).
vcl.list
List all loaded configuration.
vcl.show [-v] <configname>
Display the source code for the specified configuration.
vcl.state <configname> <state>
Force the state of the specified configuration. State is any of auto, warm or cold values.
param.show [-l] [<param>]
Show parameters and their values.
param.set <param> <value>
Set parameter value.
panic.show
Return the last panic, if any.
panic.clear [-z]
Clear the last panic, if any. -z will clear related varnishstat counter(s).
storage.list
List storage devices.
backend.list [-p] [<backend_expression>]
List backends.
backend.set_health <backend_expression> <state>
Set health status on the backends. State is any of auto, healthy or sick values.
ban <field> <operator> <arg> [&& <field> <oper> <arg> ...]
Mark obsolete all objects where all the conditions match.
ban.list
List the active bans.
Backend Expression
A backend expression can be a backend name or a combination of backend name, IP address and port in
"name(IP address:port)" format. All fields are optional. If no exact matching backend is found, partial
matching will be attempted based on the provided name, IP address and port fields.
Examples:
backend.list def*
backend.set_health default sick
backend.set_health def* healthy
backend.set_health * auto
Ban Expressions
A ban expression consists of one or more conditions. A condition consists of a field, an operator, and
an argument. Conditions can be ANDed together with "&&".
A field can be any of the variables from VCL, for instance req.url, req.http.host or obj.http.set-cookie.
Operators are "==" for direct comparison, "~" for a regular expression match, and ">" or "<" for size
comparisons. Prepending an operator with "!" negates the expression.
The argument could be a quoted string, a regexp, or an integer. Integers can have "KB", "MB", "GB" or
"TB" appended for size related fields.
VCL Temperature
A VCL program goes through several states related to the different commands: it can be loaded, used, and
later discarded. You can load several VCL programs and switch at any time from one to another. There is
only one active VCL, but the previous active VCL will be maintained active until all its transactions are
over.
Over time, if you often refresh your VCL and keep the previous versions around, resource consumption will
increase, you can't escape that. However, most of the time you want only one to pay the price only for
the active VCL and keep older VCLs in case you'd need to rollback to a previous version.
The VCL temperature allows you to minimize the footprint of inactive VCLs. Once a VCL becomes cold,
Varnish will release all the resources that can be be later reacquired. You can manually set the
temperature of a VCL or let varnish automatically handle it.
Scripting
If you are going to write a script that talks CLI to varnishd, the include/cli.h contains the relevant
magic numbers.
One particular magic number to know, is that the line with the status code and length field always is
exactly 13 characters long, including the NL character.
For your reference the sourcefile lib/libvarnish/cli_common.h contains the functions Varnish code uses to
read and write CLI response.
How -S/PSK Authentication Works
If the -S secret-file is given as argument to varnishd, all network CLI connections must authenticate, by
proving they know the contents of that file.
The file is read at the time the auth command is issued and the contents is not cached in varnishd, so it
is possible to update the file on the fly.
Use the unix file permissions to control access to the file.
An authenticated session looks like this:
critter phk> telnet localhost 1234
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
107 59
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
Authentication required.
auth 455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
200 193
-----------------------------
Varnish HTTP accelerator CLI.
-----------------------------
Type 'help' for command list.
Type 'quit' to close CLI session.
Type 'start' to launch worker process.
The CLI status of 107 indicates that authentication is necessary. The first 32 characters of the response
text is the challenge "ixsl...mpg". The challenge is randomly generated for each CLI connection, and
changes each time a 107 is emitted.
The most recently emitted challenge must be used for calculating the authenticator "455c...c89a".
The authenticator is calculated by applying the SHA256 function to the following byte sequence:
• Challenge string
• Newline (0x0a) character.
• Contents of the secret file
• Challenge string
• Newline (0x0a) character.
and dumping the resulting digest in lower-case hex.
In the above example, the secret file contained foon and thus:
critter phk> cat > _
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
foo
ixslvvxrgkjptxmcgnnsdxsvdmvfympg
^D
critter phk> hexdump -C _
00000000 69 78 73 6c 76 76 78 72 67 6b 6a 70 74 78 6d 63 |ixslvvxrgkjptxmc|
00000010 67 6e 6e 73 64 78 73 76 64 6d 76 66 79 6d 70 67 |gnnsdxsvdmvfympg|
00000020 0a 66 6f 6f 0a 69 78 73 6c 76 76 78 72 67 6b 6a |.foo.ixslvvxrgkj|
00000030 70 74 78 6d 63 67 6e 6e 73 64 78 73 76 64 6d 76 |ptxmcgnnsdxsvdmv|
00000040 66 79 6d 70 67 0a |fympg.|
00000046
critter phk> sha256 _
SHA256 (_) = 455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
critter phk> openssl dgst -sha256 < _
455ce847f0073c7ab3b1465f74507b75d3dc064c1e7de3b71e00de9092fdc89a
The sourcefile lib/libvarnish/cli_auth.c contains a useful function which calculates the response, given
an open filedescriptor to the secret file, and the challenge string.
EXAMPLES
Simple example: All requests where req.url exactly matches the string /news are banned from the cache:
req.url == "/news"
Example: Ban all documents where the serving host is "example.com" or "www.example.com", and where the
Set-Cookie header received from the backend contains "USERID=1663":
req.http.host ~ "^(?i)(www\.)example.com$" && obj.http.set-cookie ~ "USERID=1663"
AUTHORS
This manual page was originally written by Per Buer and later modified by Federico G. Schwindt, Dridi
Boukelmoune, Lasse Karstensen and Poul-Henning Kamp.
SEE ALSO
• varnishadm(1) • varnishd(1) • vcl(7) VARNISH-CLI(7)