Training material and related tools

This repository contains:

• The training material used for our Varnish training (the source for the slides and printed version)
• A snapshot of munin graphs for use by instructors.
• PHP example-code for testing Varnish
• Build system for said training material

This is the training material Varnish Software uses for professional Varnish training courses. It is made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license (See the LICENSE file for details) as a book.

The build system produces different sets of PDFs. Varnish Software currently offers two different two-day courses: Varnish System Administration, which contains all chapters except the HTTP chapter and Content Composition; and Varnish for Web Developers which contains all chapters except Tuning and Saving the Request. The third set of slides, labeled Book, contains all chapters. All the chapters are written with this structure in mind.

Thanks

In addition to the authors, the following deserve special thanks (in no particular order):

• Rubén Romero
• Sevan Janiyan
• Kacper Wysocki
• Magnus Hagander
• Martin Blix Grydeland
• Poul-Henning Kamp
• Everyone who has participated on the training courses

Index

• build/ - Created on make, contains PDF output, html-output and necessary images
• Makefile
• material/ - PHP files, mainly used by the web-dev material
• misc/ - Contains strange stuff. Including the old course (Linpro-source) and a patch for rst2s5 needed (and a pre-patched version).
• munin/ - Anonymized munin graphs for instructors
• NEWS - List of changes _instructors_ should be be aware of from version to version.
• README - This file
• TODO
• ui/ - Images, style-definitions for PDFs and CSS for the slides.
• util/ - Headers for the rst, tool to make version.rst, strip-class to remove an rst-class (for generating slides as PDF instead of s5).
• varnish_book.rst - course itself
• vcl/ - VCL files used in the course. Not a copy. Included directly as-is, and verified by make check. (note: If 'backend' is missing, a generic backend will be added on the fly during make check).

Building the material

The following tools are needed:

• rst2pdf
• gawk (old awk is not sufficient)
• bash (I'm lazy)
• git (somewhat optional, I believe)
• make (possibly GNU make. Not tested)
• dot (for images)
• varnishd

All build-stuff is handled by make. The following is an incomplete list of targets:

make check

Does syntax-checking on VCL and php-files. Ensures that they are used too.

make all

Builds all PDFs (not sphinx)

make dist

Builds tar-balls for use by instructurs, which contain PDFs, munin-snapshot, www-examples (material/), NEWS and a bit more.

make clean

removes build/

make sphinx

Builds sphinx into build/html/

make sphinx-dist

Pushes the sphinx-build to the official server. Requires access to the right servers, naturally.

make flowchartupdate

Updates the VCL flowcharts from varnish source-code, assuming the correct .c-file (e.g: varnish source-code) is located where Makefile checks. (read Makefile).

make util/param.rst

Might require deleting the file first. Fetches varnish-parameters from varnishd (as found in your PATH) and updates the util/param.rst with the correct macros.

make sourceupdate

Does both the util/param.rst-thing and flowchartupdate.

Updating the training material

The first thing you should do, is grab a copy of the various RST documentation out there. Sadly enough, you will need it for some of the finer points.

The second thing you should do, is read NEWS, and make sure you always add significant content changes there, so the instructor(s) can keep track of what changes between version-1.5 and version-1.7 without reading commit logs which also contain edits to Makefile and whatnot.

• rst2pdf

rst2pdf generates the PDF, and needs a bit of help to get page numbering properly formated, that's where the oddeven stuff at the top comes in. The problem with that, is that it is not proper rst, so other tools will complain about it.

I have tried to use tip, warning and note, and no further "boxes".

To change the look of the PDF, change ui/pdf.style.

Legal

This material is provided under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. The license is available from:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

And a copy of the license is available in the LICENSE file.

Clarification: The Non-Commercial clause of the CC-BY-NC-SA license is intentionally vague in the original license. Varnish Software does not interpret reading of the material as commercial, regardless of context (e.g: You can read the material at work, for the benefit of your self and the company). The Non-Commercial clause is intended to block competition with other commercial training offerings and to prohibit commercial printing and selling of the book. If you have any doubt as to how this should be interpreted, please contact [email protected] for clarification before proceeding.