How to set up Nginx as a caching reverse proxy?

I don't think that there is a way to explicitly invalidate cached items, but here is an example of how to do the rest. Update: As mentioned by Piotr in another answer, there is a cache purge module that you can use. You can also force a refresh of a cached item using nginx's proxy_cache_bypass - see Cherian's answer for more information.

In this configuration, items that aren't cached will be retrieved from example.net and stored. The cached versions will be served up to future clients until they are no longer valid (60 minutes).

Your Cache-Control and Expires HTTP headers will be honored, so if you want to explicitly set an expiration date, you can do that by setting the correct headers in whatever you are proxying to.

There are lots of parameters that you can tune - see the nginx Proxy module documentation for more information about all of this including details on the meaning of the different settings/parameters: http://nginx.org/r/proxy_cache_path

http {
  proxy_cache_path  /var/www/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-cache:8m max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
  proxy_temp_path /var/www/cache/tmp; 


  server {
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://example.net;
      proxy_cache my-cache;
      proxy_cache_valid  200 302  60m;
      proxy_cache_valid  404      1m;
    }
  }
}

You can specifically invalidate cached pages through

proxy_cache_bypass

Say you want to cache a page, set cache this way

location = /pageid {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:82;
  proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
  proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_ignore_headers Set-Cookie; 
  proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control; 
  proxy_cache_bypass        $http_secret_header;
  add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status;
}

Now, when you want to invalidate that page and cache again

Do a secret curl call with the header

curl "www.site.com/pageid" -s -I -H "secret_header:true"

It will invalidate and cache it.

Works from nginx 0.7.

As an added bonus the add_header X-Cache-Status can be used to check if the page is from cache or not.

How to set up Nginx as a caching reverse proxy?

Related

Recent Posts