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How can I tell Varnish to show a custom html error page instead of the default "Guru Meditation" message?

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Could be done with some inline C, see: mohanjith.net/blog/2009/08/… – 3molo Mar 16 '11 at 12:35
Thanks, why don't you make that comment a suggested answer? – Christian Davén Mar 16 '11 at 12:57

2 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted

The Varnish FAQ suggests using vcl_error for this (and it's how I've done it):

This is the default VCL for the error page:

sub vcl_error {
    set obj.http.Content-Type = "text/html; charset=utf-8";

    synthetic {"
        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
        <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
            "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
        <html>
            <head>
                <title>"} obj.status " " obj.response {"</title>
            </head>
            <body>
                <h1>Error "} obj.status " " obj.response {"</h1>
                <p>"} obj.response {"</p>
                <h3>Guru Meditation:</h3>
                <p>XID: "} req.xid {"</p>
                <address><a href="http://www.varnish-cache.org/">Varnish</a></address>
            </body>
        </html>
    "};
    return(deliver);
}

if you want a custom version, simply override the function in your config and replace the markup in the synthetic statement.

If you want to have different markup for different error codes you can do that fairly easily too:

sub vcl_error {
    set obj.http.Content-Type = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
    if (obj.status == 404) {
        synthetic {"
            <!-- Markup for the 404 page goes here -->
        "};
    } else if (obj.status == 500) {
        synthetic {"
            <!-- Markup for the 500 page goes here -->
        "};
    } else {
        synthetic {"
            <!-- Markup for a generic error page goes here -->
        "};
    }
}
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up vote 1 down vote

The default vcl code above (and in the official FAQ) is incorrect . Here is verbatim paste from default.vcl:

sub vcl_error {
    set obj.http.Content-Type = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
    set obj.http.Retry-After = "5";
    synthetic {"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>"} + obj.status + " " + obj.response + {"</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Error "} + obj.status + " " + obj.response + {"</h1>
    <p>"} + obj.response + {"</p>
    <h3>Guru Meditation:</h3>
    <p>XID: "} + req.xid + {"</p>
    <hr>
    <p>Varnish cache server</p>
  </body>
</html>[enter link description here][1]
"};
    return (deliver);
}
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