Guides

Start here

Go from zero to Fastly with this step-by-step guide.

Getting started

These articles provide basic instructions for getting started with Fastly services.

These articles provide basic information and instructions for configuring Fastly services after getting started.

• Content and its delivery
• Shielding
• Using Fastly's global POP network
• Working with health checks
• Working with CNAME records and your DNS provider
• Working with domains
• Working with hosts
• Working with services

These articles describe key features of the Fastly web interface controls.

• About the account menu
• About the Deliver page
• About the Compute page
• About the Domain Inspector stats
• About the Edge Observer page
• About the Home page
• About the Observability page
• About the Origin Inspector stats
• About the Resources page
• About the Secure page
• About the stats for Compute services
• About the stats for Deliver services
• About the web interface controls

Configuration

These articles provide basic instructions for configuring Fastly services after getting started.

These articles describe configuration settings and changes you can make to your cache settings when setting up Fastly services.

• Controlling caching
• Enabling API caching
• Implementing API cache control
• Overriding caching defaults based on a backend response
• Preventing cache poisoning via HTTP X-headers
• Segmented Caching
• Caching configuration best practices

These articles describe conditions and how to use them in VCL and the Fastly web interface.

• Troubleshooting conditions
• Using conditions
• About conditions

These articles describe how to create your own VCL files with specialized configurations.

• About VCL Snippets
• Basic authentication
• Custom responses that don't hit origin servers
• Guide to VCL
• Isolating header values without regular expressions
• Response Cookie handling
• Understanding the different PASS action behaviors
• Uploading custom VCL
• VCL regular expression cheat sheet
• Manipulating the cache key
• Using dynamic VCL Snippets
• Using regular VCL Snippets

These articles describe how to move rapid key/value pair decision logic to the edge using dictionaries.

• About dictionaries
• Working with dictionaries using the web interface

These articles describe configuration settings and changes you can make to your domains and origins when setting up Fastly services.

• Changing origins based on user location
• Failover configuration
• Maintaining separate HTTP and HTTPS requests to origin servers
• Routing assets to different origins
• Setting up redundant origin servers
• Specifying an override host
• Using Fastly with apex domains
• IPv6 support

These articles describe configuration settings and changes you can make to your headers when setting up Fastly services.

• Adding or modifying headers on HTTP requests and responses
• Removing headers from backend response
• Setting Content Type based on file extension
• Enabling cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)

These articles provide basic instructions for and examples of setting up and beginning to use the Fastly Image Optimizer.

• About Fastly Image Optimizer

These articles provide information about distributing requests across multiple servers to optimize resource use and avoid overloading any single resource.

• About Dynamic Servers
• Automatic load balancing
• Creating and using pools with Dynamic Servers
• Creating and using server entries with Dynamic Servers

These articles provide information about monitoring your services via the web interface.

• Working with the Edge Observer dashboards

These articles describe how to adjust the performance of Fastly's services beyond standard configuration methods.

• Failure modes with large files
• HTTP/2 server push
• Making query strings agnostic
• Precision Path
• Streaming Miss
• Enabling automatic compression
• Enabling HTTP/3 for Fastly services
• Serving stale content

These articles describe how to purge cache.

• Purging a URL via the web interface
• Purging all content via the web interface
• Purging with surrogate keys
• Setting Surrogate-Key headers for Amazon S3 origins
• Working with surrogate keys
• Authenticating URL purge requests via API
• Soft purges
• Wildcard purges

These articles describe configuration settings and changes you can make to requests when working with Fastly services.

• Checking multiple backends for a single request
• Conditionally changing a URL
• How request settings are applied

These articles describe configuration settings and changes you can make to your response settings when setting up Fastly services.

• Creating and customizing a robots.txt file
• Creating error pages with custom responses
• Responses tutorial

These articles describe setup and configuration guidelines for setting up live stream delivery or video on-demand.

• Adaptive bitrate playback URL guidelines
• Collecting OTFP metrics
• Streaming configuration guidelines

Security

These articles provide information about the administrative, physical, and technical safeguards that protect the Fastly CDN service, as well as describe how to secure communications between Fastly and your origin servers and customers.

These articles describe how to restrict access to resources by allowing or blocking IP addresses with access control lists (ACLs).

• Manually creating access control lists
• Using the IP block list
• Working with ACLs using the web interface
• About ACLs

These articles describe how to work with Fastly's rate limiting features.

• About rate limiting
• Working with rate limiting policies

These articles describe how to secure communications between Fastly, your origin servers, and your customers.

• Support for App Transport Security

These articles provide information about the administrative, physical, and technical safeguards that protect the Fastly CDN service.

• Data management
• Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) security measures
• Penetration testing your service behind Fastly
• Security measures
• Security program

These articles describe how to set up TLS certificates with Fastly services.

• Enabling HSTS through Fastly
• Enabling TLS 1.3 through Fastly
• Setting up TLS on a shared Fastly domain
• Setting up TLS with your own certificates
• TLS termination
• Forcing a TLS redirect
• Setting up Mutual TLS authentication
• Setting up TLS with certificates Fastly manages

These articles provide information about the Fastly Web Application Firewall (WAF 2020) security product.

• About the Fastly WAF rule management interface (2020)
• WAF Rule Exclusions (2020)
• About the Fastly WAF dashboard (2020)
• Creating a custom WAF error page (2020)
• Fastly WAF logging (2020)
• Managing rules on the Fastly WAF (2020)
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2020)

These articles provide information about the original Fastly Web Application Firewall (WAF) security product.

• About the Fastly WAF rule management interface (original)
• About the Fastly WAF dashboard (original)
• Creating a custom WAF error page (original)
• Fastly WAF logging (original)
• Fastly WAF rule set updates and maintenance (original)
• Managing the Fastly WAF (original)
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) (original)

Integrations

These articles describe how Fastly services interoperate with non-Fastly services.

These articles describe Fastly's support for protocols that allow you to stream logs to a variety of locations, including third-party services, for storage and analysis.

• Log streaming: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• Log streaming: Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Log streaming: Datadog
• Log streaming: Elasticsearch
• Log streaming: FTP
• Log streaming: Google BigQuery
• Log streaming: Google Cloud Pub/Sub
• Log streaming: Honeycomb
• Log streaming: Hydrolix
• Log streaming: Kafka
• Log streaming: Log Shuttle
• Log streaming: LogDNA
• Log streaming: Loggly
• Log streaming: Heroku's Logplex
• Log streaming: OpenStack
• Log streaming: Papertrail
• Log streaming: Scalyr
• Log streaming: SFTP
• Log streaming: Shape Log Analysis
• Log streaming: Sumo Logic
• Log streaming: Syslog
• Log streaming: Amazon S3
• Log streaming: Cloud Files
• Log streaming: Coralogix
• Log streaming: DigitalOcean Spaces
• Log streaming: Google Cloud Storage
• Log streaming: HTTPS
• Log streaming: New Relic Logs
• Log streaming: Oracle Cloud Storage
• Log streaming: Splunk
• Log streaming: Storj DCS
• Log streaming: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

These articles describe how non-Fastly services interoperate with Fastly.

• Data transfer with Backblaze B2
• Discounted egress from Google
• Outbound data transfer from Azure
• PerimeterX Bot Defender
• Alibaba Object Storage Service
• Amazon S3
• Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
• DigitalOcean Spaces
• Google Cloud Storage
• Google Compute Engine
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Oracle Cloud Storage
• Storj DCS Object Storage
• Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

Diagnostics

These articles describe how to log data, troubleshoot problems, and tune performance.

These articles describe common errors you may encounter when setting up and configuring Fastly services.

• Common 400 errors on Fastly
• Common OTFP errors
• Common service and domain errors
• Error 1000 with CloudFlare DNS
• Fixing cross-domain errors
• Loop detection
• TLS certificate errors
• Common 503 errors on Fastly
• TLS origin configuration messages

Because Fastly doesn't store customer logs, we provide information about debugging techniques that help you gain insights into your service configurations.

• Changing connection timeouts to your origin
• Debugging with WebPageTest
• Fastly's service status
• Google Pagespeed module errors
• Googlebot crawl stats
• Temporarily disabling caching
• Checking cache
• Debugging with mtr
• Using GET instead of HEAD for command line caching tests

These articles describe how we support real-time log streaming of data that passes through Fastly.

• About Fastly's real-time log streaming features
• Changing where log files are written
• Configuring Google IAM service account impersonation to avoid storing keys on Fastly logging
• Useful conditions for logging
• Useful log formats
• Changing log compression formats
• Changing log line formats
• Changing log placement
• Creating an AWS IAM role for Fastly logging
• Custom log formats
• Encrypting logs
• Setting up remote log streaming
• Useful variables to log

Account info

These articles describe how to manage account access, billing, and security.

These articles describe how to manage account access.

• Account lockouts
• Changing company profile details
• Enabling an IP allowlist for account logins through the web interface
• Finding and managing your account info
• Reviewing service activity with the event log
• Using API tokens
• Enabling and disabling two-factor authentication
• Monitoring account activity with the audit log

These articles describe Fastly's billing and payment plans and how to make adjustments to your billing information.

• Account types
• Paying your bill
• How we calculate your bill

These articles describe how to manage users with permission to access to your account.

• Adding and deleting user accounts
• Changing profile information
• Configuring user roles and permissions
• Managing multiple accounts
• Setting up single sign-on (SSO)
• Transferring services to other accounts
• Unsubscribing from Fastly marketing email

Compute@Edge

These articles describe how to configure Compute@Edge services.

These articles describe Fastly's support for protocols that allow you to stream logs to a variety of locations, including third-party services, for storage and analysis.

• Compute@Edge log streaming: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Datadog
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Elasticsearch
• Compute@Edge log streaming: FTP
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Google BigQuery
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Google Cloud Pub/Sub
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Honeycomb
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Kafka
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Log Shuttle
• Compute@Edge log streaming: LogDNA
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Loggly
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Heroku's Logplex
• Compute@Edge log streaming: OpenStack
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Papertrail
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Scalyr
• Compute@Edge log streaming: SFTP
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Sumo Logic
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Syslog
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Amazon S3
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Cloud Files
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Coralogix
• Compute@Edge log streaming: DigitalOcean Spaces
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Google Cloud Storage
• Compute@Edge log streaming: HTTPS
• Compute@Edge log streaming: New Relic Logs
• Compute@Edge log streaming: Splunk
• Setting up remote log streaming for Compute@Edge

These articles describe how to work with the edge data storage features available with Compute@Edge.

• Working with config stores
• Working with KV stores

Reference

These articles provide reference information about common Fastly terms and configuration settings.