Question

After adding a simple acl to the top of default.vcl to restrict purge requests to localhost, Varnish fails to restart. My default VCL is otherwise unmodified. default.vcl is as follows:

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

acl purge {
  "localhost";
}

It doesn’t matter if I place the acl declaration above or below the backend directive. Varnish version 3.0.2.

This should be an otherwise exteremely simple configuration.

Answer 1

Run varnishd in debug mode and it should show you where the error is. Example:

# varnishd -d -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Message from VCC-compiler:
Expected an action, 'if', '{' or '}'
('input' Line 32 Pos 6)
     resp.http.Cache-Control = "max-age=60";
-----#######################----------------