Be careful with Varnish because it is standard compliant and it will listen to your cache control headers.

If you really want to instruct Varnish to ignore headers or cookies, use something like this in your Varnish configuration:

sub vcl_recv {
//…
// you decide to cache
# Remove cookie
unset req.http.Cookie;

return (lookup);
}

Here you can manipulate response headers (modify it to your needs):
sub vcl_fetch {
set obj.grace = 300s;
set obj.http.X-Cache-Set = “NO:Not-Cacheable”;

if (obj.status >= 300) {
// if the request from backend is not 2xx, don’t cache
set obj.http.X-Cache-Set = “NO: Non 200 Code”;
pass;
}

## Cache static content
if (req.request == “GET” && (
req.url ~ “\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|png|tiff|tif|ico|img|tga|wmf)$”
|| req.url ~ “\.(svg|swf|ico|mp3|mp4|m4a|ogg|mov|avi|wmv)$”
|| req.url ~ “\.(js|css|xml|txt|pdf|pls|torrent|gz|zip|rar|bz2|tgz|tbz)$”
|| req.url ~ “^/store/(skin|js|media)/.*”
)) {
set obj.ttl = 1800s;
set obj.http.Cache-Control = “max-age = 1800″;
set obj.cacheable = true;
set obj.http.X-Cache-Set = “YES: Static”;
# remove cache headers set by Magento
unset obj.http.Pragma;
unset obj.http.Set-Cookie;
}

I recommend you to enable this and check X-Cache header:
## Called before a cached object is delivered to the client
#
sub vcl_deliver {

set resp.http.X-Served-By = “add FE name here”;

if (obj.hits > 0) {
set resp.http.X-Cache = “HIT”;
set resp.http.X-Cache-Hits = obj.hits;
} else {
set resp.http.X-Cache = “MISS”;
}
}

New version of Varnish expose only some specific objects in these functions. Please check the docs, http://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL.

Hope this is a good start to hack your Varnish configuration.

Good luck

Can anyone tell me how to get Varnish to ignore these things?

Purges only urls that needs to be refreshed

# purge_hash(“.*”);
And
#include
#include

After that varnish started properly. And is listening on port. I am running nginx. How can I start nginx with Varnish support?

I guess here, observer isn’t working, cause I can’t see the nocache cookie seted. Even if I modify the code and put garbage on it, magento runs fine, what makes me think the code isnt’ called at all.

Any clues someone?