As part of my DAY JOB[tm] I’ve been working on device detection with Varnish. There is some content about this on blogs here and there, but no single place to get rulesets or VCL. We want to fix that by announcing a community updated VCL set for this. Check out the Github project:
https://github.com/varnish/varnish-devicedetect
It is a VCL set for Varnish which uses regular expressions to group clients into pools like PC, mobile-iphone, mobile-android, tablet-ipad and more based on their User-Agent.
With this you can serve per-device-type content directly from the Varnish cache, without hitting your backend web servers. It is super easy to install with nothing to compile. Just pull the files and include them in default.vcl.
The backend sees the first request like http://example.com/foo.html?devicetype=mobile-android, picks out the GET argument and produces the content that is best suite for small androids. Later requests are cached in Varnish. The main points are: 1) no need to redirect, saving probably a second in page load time since mobile networks are high latency and low bandwidth, 2) increased cache hit rate, which means you don’t have to pay for as many backends. 3) you don’t have to maintain the regular expressions all by yourself.
In addition to the regular expression set and the supporting VCL code to send headers/GET parameter to the backend, you get a system for overriding the detection. Go to /set_ua_device/mobile-android with your usual browser, and later requests will be served as if you had an android phone. Simple as PIE.
The regular expression set will evolve over time (by us, Varnish Software, when a customer asks for it), or by community input. For example, if anyone has a good suggestions on how to differentiate android tablets and android phones, your input is very welcome :)
Blog of Lasse Karstensen 