How to clear Varnish cache for a url

Varnish made some changes in how you clear the cache in Varnish 3. Hence the confusing title. However, it's simple to clear the cache now, by using the "ban" command.

[:$] varnishadm -T 127.0.0.1:6089 ban.url /index.html

There are a few things you should be aware of. Varnish can run on different ports than 6089, so if you receive the following error:

Connection failed

It's either because the IP address or the port that Varnish is listening on isn't correct. A simple method to check this is to use the netstat command.

[:$] netstat -plnttcp 0 0 192.168.1.1:2222 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 14142/varnishd

Here we see varnish is listening on the IP address 192.168.1.1 and port 2222.So to clear/purge/ban the cache we just modify our command line command as follows

[:$] varnishadm -T 192.168.1.1:2222 ban.url /index.html

And you're done!