Book Image

Magento 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Magento 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Magento 2 is an open source e-commerce platform that has all the functionality to function from small to large online stores. It is preferred by developers and merchants due to its new architecture, which makes it possible to extend the functionalities with plugins, a lot of which are now created by the community. This merchant and developer guide is packed with recipes that cover all aspects of Magento 2. The recipes start with simple how-to’s then delve into more advanced topics as the book progresses. We start with the basics of setting up a Magento 2 project on Apache or Nginx. Next, you will learn about basics including system tools and caching to get your Magento 2 system ready for the real work. We move on to simple tasks such as managing your store and catalog configuration. When you are familiar with this, we cover more complex features such as module and extension development. Then we will jump to the final part: advanced Magento 2 extensions. By the end of this book, you’ll be competent with all the development phases of Magento 2 and its most common elements.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Magento 2 Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring Varnish as the Full Page Cache


Varnish may be one of the most interesting elements described in this book, besides Magento 2, of course. What is Varnish and why is it that important? Well, Varnish is like a Ferrari, very fast on the track but hard to maintain or tune. In technical terms, Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for heavy websites. Magento users love fast websites.

By default, Varnish support is now included in Magento 2. In Magento 1, we commonly used Turpentine by Nexcess (https://github.com/nexcess/magento-turpentine). The configuration of Varnish is not for the faint-hearted. Varnish includes a Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) file, which holds all the elements to be cached or not.

Setting up a Varnish server may be simple; configuring the VCL is not. Magento 2 provides a default VCL file that works out of the box, but be aware of any custom extensions or layout updates. Any customization has to be added manually in the VCL file before Varnish can cache...