Nginx – How to set cache to never expire and minimize requests in Nginx

http-headersnginx

I have a cache invalidation system in place, so I need to set the cache for css|js to never expire.

I tried this

location ~* \.(js|css)$ { # |png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico
  expires max;
  #log_not_found off; # what's this for?
}

And this is what I see in firebug:

enter image description here

So as you can see, requests are still being made, though they only receive a 'not modified' response. But I want to avoid them entirely, is that possible?

Also, I've read that an expirires of more than 1 year is or will be considered invalid in the standard. Is that true?

Edit

Let me complete @DisgruntledGoat's answer:

Normal access to the url, like clicking on a link or in the url bar + enter: cache works, only 1 request issued for that url, and 0 for the assets.
F5 to reload: many requests issued, but you receive all '304 not modified' responses for the assets, so they are not downloaded
ctrl + F5 to reload without cache: many requests, all '200 success', all the assets are downloaded again.

Best Answer

Are you reloading the page to test this? When you do that, browsers generally request every file again (at least Chrome does). If you instead click links to different pages on your site, the browser should just use the cache and not re-request files.

Additionally, according to the spec the Expires directive can only have a date up one year in the future, so 2037 is an invalid value. Having said that, browsers generally accept far-future values just fine.

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx – Why WordPress Loads Blank Pages on Nginx and PHP-FPM

By default the Nginx source does not define SCRIPT_FILENAME in the fastcgi_params file, so unless the repo you installed Nginx from does that you need to do it yourself.

Check if the following line is in your fastcgi_params file:

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

and if not then add it.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx – Why WordPress Loads Blank Pages on Nginx and PHP-FPM

Related Topic