April 10, 2026
Cache me outside
Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache
Varnish renames to Vinyl—then splits in two, and the crowd’s throwing popcorn
TLDR: The open-source Varnish project renamed to Vinyl Cache and moved off GitHub, while Varnish Software launched its own Varnish—now there are two. Commenters spar over old TLS battles, shrug that many use Cloudflare anyway, and watch distributions split between Vinyl and Varnish, wondering who’ll win and what to install next.
Open-source drama alert: the classic web accelerator “Varnish Cache” just rebranded to Vinyl Cache, moved off GitHub to its own home at vinyl-cache.org and code.vinyl-cache.org, and scrubbed the code to match the new name. But plot twist—Varnish Software (the company) launched its own “Varnish” on GitHub, sharing one last commit and then going its own way. Result: two projects, one legacy name, and a very confused audience.
The comments are pure fireworks. One user yanked the old beef back into the spotlight: TLS (encrypted connections). “Why did the old guard resist it?” they ask, invoking both PHK (Varnish’s creator, now with Vinyl) and Antirez (famously anti-TLS in Redis back in the day). Another veteran shrugs and says the quiet part out loud: they stopped caring once “almost every project” moved caching to Cloudflare. Translation: while the devs argue, many just outsourced the problem.
Others played referee. One commenter insists this isn’t “just another fork,” because PHK is on the Vinyl side, giving Vinyl major street cred. Another compares it to MySQL vs. MariaDB—same origin, different futures. Meanwhile, package managers are picking teams like it’s draft day: Gentoo and Wikidata lean Vinyl; Fedora and Homebrew track the company’s Varnish. Cue the memes: “Two caches enter, one leaves,” and “needles vs. polish” jokes for days.
Bottom line: the code split is real, the naming is messy, and the community is split between nostalgia, pragmatism, and popcorn.
Key Points
- •The former Varnish Cache FOSS project has been renamed to Vinyl Cache, with 9.0 released on 2026-03-16.
- •Project infrastructure moved from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance at code.vinyl-cache.org with issues and numbering preserved.
- •The GitHub Varnish Cache organization was archived, with final commits updating READMEs and build scripts to point to the new repository.
- •Source code references were changed from “Varnish” to “Vinyl,” while historical references and Varnish Software authorship remain preserved.
- •Varnish Software launched a separate “Varnish” repository and site, diverging from Vinyl Cache after commit 63806461a205a11da12deb21051f654e35acee9e; fork tracking was not used.