Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site showing you how to set up Varnish with a Laravel Forge server. Forge is a service that makes it simpler to set up and manage servers and the applications installed without having to mess with the details yourself.

For a project we’re working on at Spatie we’re expecting high traffic. That’s why we spent some time researching how to improve the request speed of a Laravel application and the amount of requests a single server can handle. There are many strategies and services you can use to speed up a site. In our specific project one of the things we settled on is Varnish. In this post I’d like to share how to set up Varnish on a Forge provisioned server.

He gives a high level overview of what Varnish is and what benefit it provides to your application (complete with illustrations) and includes a link to a presentation introducing Varnish to PHP developers. Then he moves on to installing Varnish on the server, updating the VCL configuration file and opening a port for you to use when connecting to the Varnish service. He shows the difference in the response headers when Varnish handles the response and the updates you'll need to make to get your Laravel application to play nicely with Varnish with this package.

He ends the post with examples of how to test the performance difference and some final steps to update the config and have it run on port 80 instead of the default 6081.