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

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*
   
   
3. Update your existing packages
   yum update -y
   
   
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>.rpm
   
   
5. Install railgun package
   yum install railgun-stable -y
   
   
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.
   
   
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
   
   Enter your activation token in activation.token variable 
   Enter your web server public IP in activation.railgun_host variable
   Comment 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
   
   
8. Start Memcached and Railgun
   service memcached start
service railgun start
   
   
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.