Minor bug – Available Update appears to point to disabled Varnish Application?

Noting that I have a Cloudways hosted website that started showing an available update. This is happening both in the header Update alert and as a plugin alert in the Dashboard.

The Update alert does not attach to any plugin.

Deleting plugins, this alert went away after I uninstalled Breeze. Version shows 2.0.9. Refreshed the 6.0.2 WP install and the alert went away until I refreshed.

Then I accidentally tripped up on what appears to be the cause. After re-installing Breeze, I was getting a warning that Varnish was not installed.

Logging into the (client’s) server per the KB article, I noted that under “Manage Services”, Varnish was running.

I opened up the Application > Application Settings where there is an additional setting to enable Varnish. At that point, Enabling Varnish there, removed the Alert.

Oddly, Varnish had been functional before. I am not sure when this issue started, but a few weeks ago, I did update the PHP to 7.4.

The issue with this is that it appears the disabled Varnish settings on the Server, cause the Breeze plugin to generate a plugin update alert that isn’t attached to the plugin. So if you have a lot of plugins, (which this site doesn’t have), you could plow through a lot of testing, disabling, and re-installing of plugins with no effect on removing the plugin update alert.

Additionally, running a WordFence Premium scan did not detect a plugin needing an update.

I hope this helps someone else.