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4. Declarations

A table declaration creates a key-value store in VCL code. Table keys are always of type STRING, and values may be one of a number of VCL types, but must all be of the same type within the same table.

Tables may be declared using VCL, but can also be created via an API call, using the CLI, or using the web interface.

Syntax

The following examples shows the syntax of a STRING table:

table redirects {
  "/old/path": "https://other.hostname/new/path",
  "/another/path": "/new/path",
}

The table.contains function will return a BOOL indicating whether a specified key is in the table.

For STRING tables, the table.lookup function returns the value for a specified key, or a fallback value if the key is not present in the table.

Type variations

Table declarations support a type specifier and valid types are STRING (the default), ACL, BACKEND, BOOL, FLOAT, INTEGER, IP, and RTIME. A typed table is declared like this:

table routing_table BACKEND {
  "a.example.com": b0,
  "b.example.com": b1,
  "c.example.com": b2,
}

The following functions return values from typed tables:

• table.lookup_acl
• table.lookup_backend
• table.lookup_bool
• table.lookup_float
• table.lookup_integer
• table.lookup_ip
• table.lookup_rtime

Usage

Redirects are a very common use case for tables:

Limitations

The number of items in a single table is limited to 1000 by default, but larger tables are common. If you need a larger limit than the default, get in touch with Fastly support and we'll be glad to assist you.