proxy with caching functionality

[Evan Miller]

Martin Minka <martin.minka at ...> writes:

> 
> 
> I have question 
> about caching functionality in nginx.
> 
>  
> 
> The purpose is to 
> use nginx on local server to speed up responses from <remote 
> server>.
> 1. Will the 
> following configuation cache static content from <remote server> for 5d 
> ?
> 2. Where will the 
> cached content be stored ? Directory ../nginx/proxy_temp is always 
> empty.
> 

"expires" just refers to how long items will remain in the browser cache.

Nginx cannot act as a caching proxy. There are a couple of ways to emulate
caching behavior if you control the remote server. One is to have the remote
server stuff its results in Memcached. See
http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxMemcachedModule. Another solution is for the
remote server, upon receiving a request from Nginx, to send a PUT request to
Nginx where Nginx will find the file in the future, then reply to the initial
request with X-Accel-Redirect to the newly PUTted file. I do this for some image
files I want to dynamically resize and cache. My nginx.conf looks like:

        location /images {
            include conf/fastcgi_params;
        
            if (!-f $request_filename) {
                fastcgi_pass backend;
            }
        
            dav_methods put; 
            create_full_put_path on;
            
            limit_except GET {
                allow 192.168.0.0/16;
                allow 127.0.0.1/32;
                deny all;
            }

            expires max;
        }

The advantages over the Memcache method is that MIME types will work out of the
box, the disk cache doesn't expire, and it's often faster.

Hope this helps.

Evan


>  
>                 
> location ~* 
>
^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|css|doc|xls|exe|
pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|swf|xml)$

> {                        
> include       
> conf/mime.types;     
>                         
> proxy_pass http://<remote 
> server>;          
>                         
> proxy_redirect          
> off;           
>                         
> access_log   
> logs/access.static.log;                        
> expires      
> 5d;                
> }              
> 
>  
> 
> Martin 
> Minka
> 
>  
>