Support guides

Account management

User access and control

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

• Adding and deleting user accounts
• Configuring user roles and permissions
• Email and password changes
• Merging accounts
• Setting up single sign-on (SSO)

Account management and security

These articles describe how to manage account access and security.

• Account lockouts
• Changing your account's company name
• Enabling an IP allowlist for account logins through the web interface
• Enabling and disabling two-factor authentication
• Finding and managing your account info
• Using API tokens

Account types and billing

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

• Accounts and pricing plans
• How we calculate your bill
• Paying your bill
• Who receives your bill

Basic setup

Basic setup

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

• Adding CNAME records
• Getting started with Fastly
• Glossary of terms
• IPv6 support
• Sign up and create your first service
• Working with services

Basic configuration

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

• Adding or modifying headers on HTTP requests and responses
• Caching configuration best practices
• Connecting to origins
• Creating and customizing a robots.txt file
• Creating error pages with custom responses
• Enabling automatic gzipping
• How request settings are applied
• Manipulating the X-Forwarded-For header
• Overriding caching defaults based on a backend response
• Removing headers from backend response
• Responses tutorial
• Setting Content Type based on file extension
• Specifying an override host
• Testing setup before changing domains
• Using Fastly with apex domains
• Working with domains
• Working with health checks

Basic concepts

These articles describe the most basic concepts of Fastly's CDN services.

• About the web interface controls
• Always-on DDoS mitigation
• Content and its delivery
• Fastly POP locations
• How caching and CDNs work
• How Fastly's CDN Service works
• HTTP status codes cached by default
• Self-provisioned Fastly services

Developer's tools

API Caching

These articles describe how to cache responses from an API.

• Enabling API caching
• Implementing API cache control
• Purging API cache with surrogate keys

Conditions

These articles define conditions in VCL and the Fastly web interface.

• About conditions
• Troubleshooting conditions
• Using conditions

Edge Dictionaries

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

• About Edge Dictionaries
• Private Edge Dictionaries
• Working with Edge Dictionaries using the API
• Working with Edge Dictionaries using the web interface
• Working with Edge Dictionary items using the API

Purging

These articles describe how to purge by affiliation, by URL, or even purge all of your site's cached content for a full refresh.

• Authenticating URL purge requests via API
• Getting started with surrogate keys
• Logging purge requests
• Setting Surrogate-Key headers based on a URL
• Setting Surrogate-Key headers for Amazon S3 origins
• Single purges
• Soft purges
• Wildcard purges

VCL tutorials

These articles provide information about how to use VCL to customize Fastly services.

• Accept-Language header VCL features
• Authenticating before returning a request
• Conditionally changing a URL
• Creating location-based tagging
• Custom responses that don't hit origin servers
• Delivering different content to different devices
• Guide to VCL
• Isolating header values without regular expressions
• Manipulating the cache key
• Overriding which IP address the geolocation features use
• Response Cookie handling
• Setting up redundant origin servers
• Support for the Edge-Control header
• Understanding the different PASS action behaviors
• VCL regular expression cheat sheet

Tutorials

These articles provide examples of some of the deeper technology Fastly makes available.

• Basic authentication
• Cache control tutorial
• Enabling URL token validation

Diagnostics and performance

Streaming logs

These articles describe Fastly's support for syslog and syslog-compatible log streaming providers as well as other methods of sending logging information.

• About Fastly's Real-Time Log Streaming features
• Changing log line formats
• Changing where log files are written
• Custom log formats
• Encrypting logs
• Log streaming: Amazon S3
• Log streaming: Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Log streaming: Cloud Files
• Log streaming: Datadog
• Log streaming: DigitalOcean Spaces
• Log streaming: FTP
• Log streaming: Google BigQuery
• Log streaming: Google Cloud Storage
• Log streaming: Honeycomb
• Log streaming: Log Shuttle
• Log streaming: LogDNA
• Log streaming: Logentries
• Log streaming: Loggly
• Log streaming: Heroku's Logplex
• Log streaming: OpenStack
• Log streaming: Papertrail
• Log streaming: Scalyr
• Log streaming: Splunk
• Log streaming: Sumo Logic
• Log streaming: Syslog
• Setting up remote log streaming
• Useful conditions for logging
• Useful log formats
• Useful variables to log

Debugging

These articles describe debugging techniques that help you gain insights into your service configurations.

• Browser recommendations when using the Fastly web interface
• Changing connection timeouts to your origin
• Checking cache
• Common 503 errors
• Common service and domain errors
• Debugging with mtr
• Debugging with WebPageTest
• Error 1000 with CloudFlare DNS
• Fastly's network status
• Google Pagespeed module errors
• Googlebot crawl stats
• Loop detection
• Protected headers
• Resource limits
• Temporarily disabling caching
• TLS certificate errors
• TLS origin configuration messages
• Using GET instead of HEAD for command line caching tests

Performance tuning

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

• Changing origins based on user location
• Checking multiple backends for a single request
• Controlling caching
• Enabling cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)
• Enabling global POPs
• Failover configuration
• Fixing cross-domain errors
• Generating HTTP redirects at the edge
• HTTP/2 server push
• Improving caching performance with large files
• Load-balancing configuration
• Maintaining separate HTTP and HTTPS requests to origin servers
• Making query strings agnostic
• Request collapsing
• Routing assets to different origins
• Serving stale content
• Shielding
• Tracking your origin's name, IP, and port
• Understanding cache HIT and MISS headers with shielded services
• Understanding the X-Timer header
• Using edge side includes (ESI)

Security

Access control lists

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

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

Monitoring and testing

These articles provide information about monitoring and testing the security of your services behind Fastly.

• Monitoring account activity with event logs
• Penetration testing your service behind Fastly

Securing communications

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

• Accessing Fastly's IP ranges
• Support for App Transport Security

TLS

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

• Domain validation for TLS certificates
• Enabling HSTS through Fastly
• Forcing a TLS redirect
• Managing domains on TLS certificates
• Setting up free TLS
• TLS key and certificate replacement
• TLS termination

Web Application Firewall

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

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

Migrations and integrations

Migrations

These articles describe migrations between Fastly services and non-Fastly services.

• IP geolocation variables: Migrating to the new dataset

Integrations

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

• About Fastly's Cloud Accelerator
• Amazon S3
• DigitalOcean Spaces
• Google Cloud Storage
• Google Compute Engine
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• PerimeterX Bot Defender

Load Balancer

Dynamic Servers

These articles describe how to use Dynamic Servers to dynamically distribute and direct incoming requests to a group of servers.

• About Dynamic Servers
• Creating and using pools with Dynamic Servers
• Creating and using server entries with Dynamic Servers

Tutorials

These articles explain how to use the Fastly Load Balancer.

Image optimization

Setup and use

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

• Image optimization VCL boilerplate
• Purging optimized images
• Serving images
• Serving responsive images
• Setting up image optimization

Examples

These articles provide examples of the Fastly Image Optimizer API in use.

• Automating optimization
• Controlling image quality
• Cropping images
• Reorienting images
• Resizing images
• Trimming images

Online video streaming

Live streaming

These articles describe setup and configuration guidelines for live stream delivery.

• Configuration guidelines for live streaming

On-the-fly packaging

These articles describe how to deliver packaged, adaptive bitrate video on-demand from a single source format.

• Adaptive bitrate playback URL guidelines
• Collecting OTFP metrics

Compliance and law

Compliance and Law FAQ

This FAQ answers questions we often get about our Terms of Service, our privacy statements, our documentation, our Acceptable Use Policy, and how they all work together. It does not replace any of those, nor is it legally binding on its own.

Compliance

These articles provide information about the processes and safeguards we follow to protect your data.

• Security program
• Technology compliance

Security measures

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

Third-party technology

These articles provide information about third-party technology and services incorporated into the Fastly CDN service.

Cloud-hosted products

These articles provide information about Fastly products that may use third-party infrastructure to process or store content.

Related offerings

These service level agreements offered by Fastly provide information to customers based on the nature of their agreement with Fastly and the Fastly products they have purchased.

Sub-processors

This legal statement provides information about sub-processors in connection with the provision of the Fastly Services.

Translations

This legal statement provides information about the primary language for Fastly service guides.

Archives

These articles provide links to the historical versions of our documentation, terms, and policies.

Products and services

Summary product definitions

These articles provide a short definition, in plain English, for every product Fastly offers.

Detailed product descriptions

These articles provide detailed, plain English descriptions of Fastly's products.

• Assurance Services
• DDoS Protection and Mitigation Service and SLA
• Fastly’s Full-Site Delivery services
• Fastly's Legacy Full-site Delivery services
• Fastly's Media Shield
• Fastly's On-the-Fly Packaging service
• Fastly’s Streaming Delivery services
• HIPAA-Compliant Caching and Delivery
• Legacy Platinum Support and SLA
• Legacy Premium Support and SLA
• Live Event Monitoring Service
• Logging Insights Package
• PCI-Compliant Caching and Delivery
• Performance Optimization Package
• Platform TLS Certificate Management Service
• Professional Services
• Service availability SLA
• Subscriber Provided Prefix
• Support description and SLA
• Technical Account Management
• TLS service options
• WAF Management Package
• WAF Support and SLA
• WAF Tuning Services

Fastly product lifecycle

Fastly releases or retires its products and features as detailed below.

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VCL

Cryptographic

Functions

• digest.awsv4_hmac()
• digest.base64_decode()
• digest.base64()
• digest.base64url_decode()
• digest.base64url_nopad_decode()
• digest.base64url_nopad()
• digest.base64url()
• digest.hash_crc32()
• digest.hash_crc32b()
• digest.hash_md5()
• digest.hash_sha1()
• digest.hash_sha224()
• digest.hash_sha256()
• digest.hash_sha384()
• digest.hash_sha512()
• digest.hmac_md5_base64()
• digest.hmac_md5()
• digest.hmac_sha1_base64()
• digest.hmac_sha1()
• digest.hmac_sha256_base64()
• digest.hmac_sha256()
• digest.rsa_verify()
• digest.secure_is_equal()
• digest.time_hmac_md5()
• digest.time_hmac_sha1()
• digest.time_hmac_sha256()

Date and time

Functions

• std.integer2time()
• std.time()
• strftime()
• time.add()
• time.hex_to_time()
• time.is_after()
• time.sub()

Variables

• now.sec
• now
• time.elapsed.msec_frac
• time.elapsed.msec
• time.elapsed.sec
• time.elapsed.usec_frac
• time.elapsed.usec
• time.elapsed
• time.end.msec_frac
• time.end.msec
• time.end.sec
• time.end.usec_frac
• time.end.usec
• time.end
• time.start.msec_frac
• time.start.msec
• time.start.sec
• time.start.usec_frac
• time.start.usec
• time.start
• time.to_first_byte

Edge Side Includes (ESI)

Variables

• req.esi
• req.topurl

Geolocation

Variables

• client.as.name
• client.as.number
• client.geo.area_code
• client.geo.city.ascii
• client.geo.city.utf8
• client.geo.city
• client.geo.conn_speed
• client.geo.continent_code
• client.geo.country_code
• client.geo.country_code3
• client.geo.country_name.ascii
• client.geo.country_name.utf8
• client.geo.country_name
• client.geo.gmt_offset
• client.geo.latitude
• client.geo.longitude
• client.geo.metro_code
• client.geo.postal_code
• client.geo.region
• server.datacenter
• server.region

Miscellaneous

Functions

• cstr_escape()
• http_status_matches()
• if()
• json.escape()
• prefixof()
• regsub()
• regsuball()
• setcookie.get_value_by_name()
• std.atoi()
• std.collect()
• std.ip()
• std.ip2str()
• std.str2ip()
• std.strlen()
• std.strstr()
• std.strtol()
• std.tolower()
• std.toupper()
• subfield()
• suffixof()
• urldecode()
• urlencode()

Variables

• bereq.url.basename
• bereq.url.dirname
• bereq.url.qs
• bereq.url
• beresp.backend.ip
• beresp.backend.name
• beresp.backend.port
• beresp.grace
• beresp.hipaa
• beresp.pci
• client.port
• client.requests
• client.socket.pace
• req.body.base64
• req.body
• req.grace
• req.http.host
• req.is_ipv6
• req.restarts
• req.url.basename
• req.url.dirname
• req.url.ext
• req.url.path
• req.url.qs
• req.url
• stale.exists

Query string manipulation

Functions

• boltsort.sort()
• querystring.add()
• querystring.clean()
• querystring.filter_except()
• querystring.filter()
• querystring.filtersep()
• querystring.globfilter_except()
• querystring.globfilter()
• querystring.regfilter_except()
• querystring.regfilter()
• querystring.remove()
• querystring.set()
• querystring.sort()

Randomness

Functions

• randombool_seeded()
• randombool()
• randomint_seeded()
• randomint()
• randomstr()

Size

Variables

• req.body_bytes_read
• req.bytes_read
• req.header_bytes_read
• resp.body_bytes_written
• resp.bytes_written
• resp.completed
• resp.header_bytes_written

Table

Functions

• table.lookup()

TLS and HTTP/2

Functions

• h2.push()

Variables

• fastly_info.h2.is_push
• fastly_info.h2.stream_id
• fastly_info.is_h2
• tls.client.cipher
• tls.client.ciphers_list_sha
• tls.client.ciphers_list_txt
• tls.client.ciphers_list
• tls.client.ciphers_sha
• tls.client.protocol
• tls.client.servername
• tls.client.tlsexts_list_sha
• tls.client.tlsexts_list_txt
• tls.client.tlsexts_list
• tls.client.tlsexts_sha

UUID

Functions

• uuid.dns()
• uuid.is_valid()
• uuid.is_version3()
• uuid.is_version4()
• uuid.is_version5()
• uuid.oid()
• uuid.url()
• uuid.version3()
• uuid.version4()
• uuid.version5()
• uuid.x500()

Custom VCL

• Creating custom VCL
• Uploading custom VCL
• Previewing and testing VCL

VCL Snippets

• About VCL Snippets
• Using dynamic VCL Snippets
• Using regular VCL Snippets

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API

• Authentication
• Clients
• Account
• Configuration
• Purging
• Historical stats
• Real-time analytics
• Remote logging
• Utilities
• Image optimization
• Web Application Firewall
• Dynamic Servers

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Changes

• Recent Updates
• Older Updates
• Content Snapshots