Question

When I go an action on the website, say signup or create a record, nginx renders the cached version of page before the action, however when I refresh I see the right page.

I’ve got latest passenger running with nginx with conf:

pid /opt/nginx/logs/nginx.pid;
# Run as the nginx user
user root;
worker_processes 2;

error_log /opt/nginx/logs/error.log notice;

events {
  worker_connections 1024;
  use epoll;
}

http {
  server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
  # More Linux performance awesomeness
  tcp_nopush on;
  tcp_nodelay off;

  # Where to store the body of large client requests on disk
  # NGINX will stream this to disk before posting it to your Mongrels,
  # preventing slow clients tying up your app.
  client_body_temp_path /var/spool/nginx-client-body 1 2;

  # Max size of a request from a client (usually a POST). This will
limit
  # the size of file uploads to your app
  client_body_buffer_size 8k;
  client_header_buffer_size 1k;
  client_max_body_size 1k;
  large_client_header_buffers 4 8k;

  ## Timeouts
  client_body_timeout 5;
  client_header_timeout 5;
  keepalive_timeout 5 5;
  send_timeout 5;

  ## General Options
  ignore_invalid_headers on;
  limit_zone carboncal $binary_remote_addr 1m;
  recursive_error_pages on;
  sendfile on;
  server_name_in_redirect off;
  server_tokens off;

  # passenger loading stuff
  passenger_root
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136/gems/passenger-3.0.2;
  passenger_ruby /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p136/ruby;

  include /opt/nginx/conf/mime.types;
  default_type application/octet-stream;

  ## Compression
  gzip on;
  gzip_buffers 16 8k;
  #compression level between 1 and 9
  gzip_comp_level 9;
  gzip_http_version 1.0;
  gzip_min_length 0;
  gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css image/x-icon image/bmp application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript ;
  gzip_vary on;
  gzip_proxied any;
  # Some version of IE 6 don't handle compression well on some mime-types, so just disable them
  gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";


  # Send along useful info to the mongrels
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  proxy_redirect off;
  proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

  ## Log Format
  log_format main '$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$gzip_ratio"';


  access_log /opt/nginx/logs/access.log main;

  # virtual hosting
  server {
    access_log /opt/nginx/logs/test_server.access.log main buffer=32k;
    error_log /opt/nginx/logs/test_server.error.log info;
    expires 6h;
    listen 80 default rcvbuf=64k backlog=128;
    root /opt/apps/website/public;
    server_name website.com www.website.com;
    passenger_enabled on;
if (-f $document_root/system/cache/$uri/index.html) {
  rewrite (.*) /system/cache/$1/index.html break;
}

if (-f $document_root/system/cache/$uri.html) {
  rewrite (.*) /system/cache/$1.html break;
}
  }
}

I’m guessing the problem has to do with rewrites. I’ve tried various rewrite rules, but still nothing.

Answer 1

This is what I would expect to happen. Unless I am wrong (I could be it’s been a long time since I looked at an Nginx config) your config is setting the expires header to 6 hours.

I suspect the refresh is just forcing the page to download the non cached version. You probably only want to cache the public content for 6 hours.