Question

What I’m doing is mildly insane, but since GET requests have very strict size limit, solr uses POST requests to /solr/select URL to do what is “semantically” a GET.

I’m trying to put varnish in front of solr to do some caching. I put this in vcl_recv function:

 if (!(req.request == "GET" || req.request == "HEAD" ||
     (req.request == "POST" && req.url == "/solr/select"))) {
     /* We only deal with GET and HEAD by default */
     /* Modified to support POST to /solr/select */
     return (pass);
 }

and varnish now tries to handle that except it automatically converts a POST to a GET.

I’m aware all of that is fairly ridiculous and far from any best practices, but in any case, is there an easy way to use varnish this way?

Answer 1

You could try changing the req.POST into a GET, and transform the POST data to GET parameters (you probably would have to use inline-C) and do a lookup / fetch.

This GET request limit from the HTTP spec is not necessarily implemented by either Varnish or your back-end server. As you don’t depend on intermediate caches and User-Agents outside your control to handle long urls, you could give it a try.