Migrating from Varnish

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 10:24:19AM -0600, Andrei wrote:

> > > - Does anyone have any recent working documentation on supported
> > > modules/Lua scripts which can achieve wildcard purges as well as specific
> > > URL purges?
> > 
> > Cache purging is available in nginx-plus, see
> > http://nginx.org/r/proxy_cache_purge.
> 
> I'm aware of the paid version, but I don't have  a budget for it yet, and
> quite frankly this should be a core feature for any caching service. Are
> there no viable options for the community release? It's a rather pertinent
> feature to have in my transition

I'm aware of at least one 3rd party module from Piotr Sikora, 
https://github.com/FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge.  I've never tried to 
use it, and AFAIK it doesn't support wildcard purges.  It is 
mostly known to developers as a hack that starts segfaulting on 
unrelated changes in proxy module, so obviously enough I can't 
recommend using it.

Note though that I personally think that cache purging is 
something that should _not_ be present in any caching service, and 
I wouldn't recommend using nginx-plus functionality either.  
Proper controlling of cache validity times is something that 
should be used instead.  This is what happens in browsers anyway, 
and trying to "purge" things there won't work.

> > Note well that by default nginx respects what is returned by the
> > backend in various response headers, and proxy_cache_valid time
> > only applies if there are no explicit cache validity time set, see
> > http://nginx.org/r/proxy_ignore_headers.
> 
> So to override the ttls set by the backend, I would have to use
> proxy_ignore_headers for all headers which can directly affect the intended
> TTL?

Yes, if you want to ignore what the backend set.  In many cases 
this might not be a good idea though.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://mdounin.ru/