Varnish won't cache - Age 0

Question

I seem to be having some problems with my Varnish set up. I have a clean install of Varnish and Nginx running on ubuntu, everything seems to be running, but I don't seem to be actually caching anything.

This is what im seeing:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
Content-Type:   text/html; charset=UTF-8
Vary:   Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By:   PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.14
Cache-Control:  no-cache
Date:   Tue, 02 Feb 2016 10:15:17 GMT
Content-Encoding:   gzip
X-Varnish:  196655
Age:    0
Via:    1.1 varnish-v4
Accept-Ranges:  bytes
Connection: keep-alive

I'm almost certain the problem is to do with the "age" response being 0. I have read that the Cache-Control header can be the culprit and have spent some time configuring both nginx and my vcl file with solutions I have read on-line, none of which have worked.

I'm open to any ideas even ones I have tried before (hence why im not listing the steps I have already taken).

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have.

Answer 1

Remove "no-cache" and set "max-age=120" (in seconds) in the Cache-Control header instead.

Also note that if the request contains any cookies or if the response sets any cookies than by default varnish is not gonna cache.