Guide to Setup Railgun Listener on CentOS 6/7 Web Server

Updated on : Oct 28, 2019 Category : Optimization

Railgun is a WAN optimization technology developed by Cloudflare and is available to Cloudflare Business and Enterprise customers, as well as Optimized Partners. Railgun requires a piece of software called the Railgun Listener to be installed on your web server’s network.

Railgun is a single daemon that runs on a 64-bit system which uses alternative compression techniques to dramatically speed up WAN performance. It proxies traffic through a special protocol that would normally travel between Cloudflare and your origin server over HTTP.

Requirements

  • Sudo access for the web server
  • Railgun Activation Token from Cloudflare

Procedure

  1. Login to your web server where you want to install Railgun listener
  2. Check your CentOS Release
    cat /etc/*release*
    check centos release
  3. Update your existing packages
    yum update -y
    yum update
  4. Install RPM to add the repository (replace <VERSION> with the release version number)
    sudo rpm -ivh http://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-release-latest.el<VERSION>.rpmExample –

    CentOS 7 – sudo rpm -ivh http://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-release-latest.el7.rpm
    CentOS 6 – sudo rpm -ivh http://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-release-latest.el6.rpm
    add cloudflare rpm

  5. Install railgun package
    yum install railgun-stable -y
    install railgun install railgun
  6. Edit Memcached config file accordingly /etc/sysconfig/memcached
    nano /etc/sysconfig/memcached
    We will remove port and make Memcached run on Socket instead of Port.
    We will set the cache size to 4096MB i.e 4GB
    For us, maximum connection limit will be 20000We will set the path of the Memcached socket file in /tmp directory with 777 permissions in OPTIONS variable
    OPTIONS="-s /tmp/memcached.sock -a 0777"
    This is how our Memcached config file will look like.
    memcached config
  7. Edit Railgun config file for Activation Token and few other things /etc/railgun/railgun.conf
    nano /etc/railgun/railgun.conf

    Get Activation Token 
    Website Owners: activation.token can be found at
    https://www.cloudflare.com/a/account/my-account
    Cloudflare Hosting Partners: activation.token can be found at
    https://partners.cloudflare.com

    BaseZap Customers can contact us for Railgun Token Details.

    Enter your activation token in activation.token variable 
    Enter your web server public IP in activation.railgun_host variable
    railgun configComment out using ‘#’ or delete memcached.servers variable with localhost IP and port.
    #memcached.servers = 127.0.0.1:11211
    Set socket file path using memcached.servers variable in railgun config file
    memcached.servers = /tmp/memcached.sock
    railgun config memcached

  8. Start Memcached and Railgun
    service memcached start
    service railgun start
    start memcached railgun
  9. Add Memcached and Railgun to startup file that will start them at boot up
    chkconfig memcached on
    chkconfig railgun on
  10. If all above steps are performed successfully then your railgun setup has been completed.