cosimo / varnish-accept-language

Varnish Accept-Language VCL
===========================

Last updated: 03/11/2011
	Cosimo Streppone <[email protected]>
	Opera Software ASA

Here you will find a VCL config file for Varnish (http://varnish-cache.org)
This VCL allows you to normalize and filter all the incoming requests
Accept-Language headers and reduce them to just the languages your site supports.

*** WARNING ***
This VCL consists of C code. Your Varnish might explode. YMMV.
Don't use it in production if you don't know what you're doing.
We are using it in production, but we _don't_ know what we're doing :).


Why would you want this?
------------------------

Your site supports English and Japanese languages.
Your client browsers will send every possible Accept-Language header on Earth.
If you enable "Vary: Accept-Language" on Varnish or on your backends,
the cache hit ratio will rapidly drop, because of the huge variations
in Accept-Language contents.

With this VCL, the Accept-Language header will be "rewritten" to just
"en" or "ja", depending on your client settings. If no match occurs,
you can select a default language.

The rewritten header is "X-Varnish-Accept-Language".
You can choose to put this header back in "Accept-Language" if you wish.
In this way, the normalization will be completely transparent.


Requirements
------------

- gcc, make
- a recent perl, with `prove'


Instructions
-------------

1) Run 'make' informing the list of languages your site supports
   and the default fallback in the command line, e.g.

   make DEFAULT_LANGUAGE=en SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES="en ja pt pt-br"

2) Run 'make test'
   You should see "All tests successful" at the end of the execution

3) Install the generated accept-language.vcl in /etc/varnish/

4) At the top of your main VCL file, add the following line:

     include "/etc/varnish/accept-language.vcl";

   and then in your vcl_recv() add:

     C{
     vcl_rewrite_accept_language(sp);
     }C

   This will parse Accept-Language and insert the final language into the
   "X-Varnish-Accept-Language" header (req.http.X-Varnish-Accept-Language).

6) Restart Varnish

7) Cross your fingers

8) Profit !!