Device based origin selection

Device based origin selection

Below is an example of how to configure your Content Delivery Grid to direct requests to different origins based on the requesting user’s device type.

Prerequisites:

• section.io account
• section.io application running Varnish
• A separate origin with content for different devices

In your default.vcl file you can set a header that’s recognizable in section.io’s last-proxy to determine which origin address and host header to make the request with. So you are going to need to define that origin first in your section.config.json file located in the root of your applications git repo. You will be adding a key called alternate_origins under environments.Production.

section.config.json

...
"environments": {
    "Production": {
        "origin": {
            "address": "203.0.113.1"
        },
        "alternate_origins": {
            "mobile_device": {
                "address": "203.0.113.2"
            }
        }           
    },
...

default.vcl

Next we tell Varnish Cache to use this origin for requests if we detect the User-Agent as a mobile device. Use the origin names defined in section.config.json.

sub devicedetect {
    # The VCL here is just an example, it is not a exhaustive device detection logic.
    if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "(?i)samsung|iphone|ipod|pixel") {
        set req.http.device-type = "mobile";
    }
}

sub vcl_recv {
    ...
    call devicedetect;
    if ( req.http.device-type == "mobile" ) {
        set req.http.section-origin = "mobile_device";
    }
    ...
}

Note 1: Requests from non-mobile devices will be directed at the default origin of 203.0.113.1. Note 2: If you are caching responses, make sure to hash_data(req.http.section-origin) to split the cache based on origin.

Overview

This use case is especially helpful if you are serving unique content to different devices or just to keep load off your default origin when the request is from a mobile device. section.io handles all the internals of actually making the request to your mobile_device origin and all you have to do is configure your reverse proxy setup in your git repo!