Question

I am using Nodejs and Express Js. Also I add NowJS to the Express Js to do some real-time stuffs.

In the configuration file I have

app.configure('production', function() {
var oneYear = 31557600000;
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public', { maxAge: oneYear }));
app.use(express.errorHandler());});

And I run the application using this command:

$ NODE_ENV=production node app.js

However, the files(images, css, js) seem not to be cached, they are always served as new file.

P/s: I have just tested it with localhost, the cache seems to work on localhost, however, when uploading to the server, the cache is not working anymore.

Answer 1

Express is built on Connect, and Connect provides the “static” middleware. Here’s the code under the hood for the caching:

if (!res.getHeader('Cache-Control')) res.setHeader('Cache-Control', 'public, max-age=' + (maxAge / 1000));

You can find that code here:

https://github.com/senchalabs/connect/blob/master/lib/middleware/static.js#L147

So as you can see Express is sending a “Cache-Control” header to the browser, telling him to cache that file for a period. So this isn’t a “load a file once and then always serve it to all clients”, but more of a “tell each client to cache the file the first time he downloads it” (which means all the clients will have to download that file once before it’s cached for them).