🔗 Configuring a Basic Reverse Proxy (Website Accelerator)

🔗 Outline

This configuration covers the basic Reverse Proxy (Accelerator) config. More advanced configurations all build on these basic settings.

see the FAQ Reverse Proxy page for detailed overview of what Reverse-Proxy and HTTP Acceleration are.

The accel option to http_port should only be specified for 2.6.STABLE8 and later.

🔗 Squid Configuration File

This configuration MUST appear at the top of squid.conf above any other forward-proxy configuration (http_access etc). Otherwise the standard proxy access rules block some people viewing the accelerated site.

First, you have to tell Squid to listen on port 80 (usually), so set the http_port option with the defaultsite option telling Squid it’s an accelerator for this site:

http_port 80 accel defaultsite=your.main.website.name no-vhost

• accel tells Squid to handle requests coming in this port as if it was a Web Server
• defaultsite=X tells Squid to assume the domain X is wanted.
• no-vhost for Squid-3.2 or later disables HTTP/1.1 domain based virtual hosting support. Omit this option for older Squid versions.

Next, you need to tell Squid where to find the real web server:

cache_peer backend.webserver.ip.or.dnsname parent 80 0 no-query originserver name=myAccel

And finally you need to set up access controls to allow access to your site without pushing other web requests to your web server.

acl our_sites dstdomain your.main.website.name
http_access allow our_sites
cache_peer_access myAccel allow our_sites
cache_peer_access myAccel deny all

You should now be able to start Squid and it will serve requests as a HTTP server.

🔗 Testing and Live

Testing of reverse-proxies should be done with Squid configured properly as it would be used in production. But the public DNS setting not pointing at it. The /etc/hosts file of a test machine can be altered to send test requests to the squid IP instead of the live webserver.

When that testing works, public DNS can be updated to send public requests to the Squid proxy instead of the master web server and Acceleration will begin immediately.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Any example presented here is provided "as-is" with no support
or guarantee of suitability. If you have any further questions about
these examples please email the squid-users mailing list.

Categories: ConfigExample

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