Absolute rather than relative times in expires directives

[Ryan Malayter]

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 6:39 AM, Mark James <mrj at advancedcontrols.com.au> wrote:
> On 08/01/10 19:51, Denis F. Latypoff wrote:
>>
>> 01.08.2010, 13:23, "Mark James"<mrj at advancedcontrols.com.au>:
>>>
>>> I have a static HTML page that is updated at midnight each day. So I'd
>>> like to set its expires directive to an absolute
>>> rather than a relative time.
>>
>> Yes:
>>     expires @23h59m;
>
> Thanks Denis!
>
> That form of the expires directive wasn't in the English documentation at
> http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpHeadersModule .
>
> I've re-written the English documentation for the expires directive as best
> I could, which included adding the "@" and "modified" forms that were only
> in the Russian doc.
>

It's not in the English or Russian documentation, but is it possible
to add any other Cache-Control directives along with expires?

For example, if you want "Cache-Control: private,max-age=300" you need
to do it manually with add_header instead of expires. But then you
lose the ability to use the other "calculation" features of expires
(like modified or @). You also don't get an actual "Expires" header
for HTTP/1.0 clients and proxies if you have to use add_header
instead.

Obviously, adding any RFC-compliant Cache-Control directive would be
desirable. The "public" keyword in particular is needed to allow
Firefox to cache images and the like which are delivered over SSL, and
"private" is clearly desirable for caching per-user information.
Others like "must-revalidate" are less useful in the general sense.

If this isn't possible with the current implementation, please let me
know and I will take a look at trying to make a simple patch (my first
foray into nginx source instructed me that my C skills are way too
rusty for deep modification or module-writing with nginx).


-- 
RPM