# Starting and running Varnish

This section covers starting, running, and stopping Varnish, command line flags and options, and communicating with the running Varnish processes, configuring storage and sockets and, and about securing and protecting Varnish against attacks.

- Security first
  - Command line arguments
  - The CLI interface
  - VCL programs
  - HTTP requests
- Important command line arguments
  - ‘-a’ listen_address
  - ‘-f’ VCL-file or ‘-b’ backend
  - Other options
- CLI - bossing Varnish around
  - What can you do with the CLI
  - The shell, the other CLI
- Storage backends
  - Intro
  - default
  - malloc
  - umem
  - file
  - persistent (experimental)
- Transient Storage
- Parameters
- Sizing your cache