While playing around with the fancy error pages I wanted to use them with Varnish as well. Since there is no means to include a file or serve a file from Varnish (without serving from a back end server), I went with inline C snippet to read and serve the error pages. Please note that the style sheet and the images are being served from a CDN. Otherwise it will have to be cached prior to the back end server becoming inaccessible. Here is the whole vcl_error sub. You will notice that we fall back to default Varnish error page for anything other than 5XX errors.

[code lang=’c’]sub vcl_error {
set obj.http.Content-Type = “text/html; charset=utf-8”;

if ( obj.status >= 500 && obj.status <= 505) { C{ #include
#include

FILE * pFile;
char content [100];
char page [10240];
char fname [50];

page[0] = ‘\0’;
sprintf(fname, “/var/www/errors/%d.html”, VRT_r_obj_status(sp));

pFile = fopen(fname, “r”);
while (fgets(content, 100, pFile)) {
strcat(page, content);
}
fclose(pFile);
VRT_synth_page(sp, 0, page, ““, vrt_magic_string_end);
}C
} else {
synthetic {”

Error “} obj.status ” ” obj.response {“

“} obj.response {“

Guru Meditation:

XID: “} req.xid {“

“};
}

return (deliver);
}[/code]

Hope someone will find this useful as I had to put some effort to find out all the internal Varnish function names