I am trying for a while to use vmods with varnish. But, it seems, I need to build varnish from source if I want to integrate a vmod, for example, statsd. But, I have already running varnish successfully by installing it via rpm on my centos7 machine.
My question is, is it possible to use a vmod when varnish is installed from rpm? How to do it?
With Varnish 4.0 from RPM you can install vmods from source without any recompiling.
Install the varnish-libs-devel first, and then do the normal autogen.sh + configure + make install sequence in the vmod source directory.
This of course depends on the vmod in question still has an available 4.0 version, but most of the common ones still do.
Unless you are using one of the supplied vmods I would still install the source, perhaps on a build machine and build your vmods there and then deploy your vmods to your production server. Or, if you have something like an ansible script untar the source, build your vmod, move it into place and remove the source. Building varnish from the source will not override your binaries that originate from the RPMs - the executables will be in different directories. You may need to alter the order of your path if you keep both versions present.
