allow different cache times for different urls

[lanterndev]

From http-party/http-server#63:

Currently http-server allows you to configure the "cache-control: max-age" value for all urls. But often you want a short max-age for e.g. /{index.html} and a long max-age for urls to versioned assets like /styles/f35ac111.main.css.

Would you accept a patch to allow specifying different max-ages for different urls?

I realized http-server is just using ecstatic under the hood, which also only allows setting a single max-age for all responses.

Any suggestions on the simplest approach to giving versioned assets a longer max-age than non-versioned assets? Would be happy to submit a patch if there is interest in supporting this.

[jfhbrook]

I'm down to support it, but I'm not sure what the API would look like. Presumably it would be a hash keyed by req.url.

[lanterndev]

I'm down to support it

excellent, thanks!

but I'm not sure what the API would look like. Presumably it would be a hash keyed by req.url.

The most general way might be a hash keyed by regular expressions that the url is successively matched against (and /.*/ could come last). But if it's simpler, just giving a long max-age to every asset with a name like a1b2c3d4.filename.ext would probably work for many use cases.

[jfhbrook]

Best to do it the right way, which sounds like hashes.

[grrowl]

+1, my use case being we have a directory with largeish, never changing assets in them, but the rest of the assets should be ~5min cache time.

I haven't looked at the code yet, but my thoughts would be to check if opts.cache is a function on request, if so call it with res, req and allow it to return a value in seconds, to be treated the same as the existing option.

Is this good or is there a more ecstatic way of doing things? I can submit a PR within the next week, since I expect this to be an important optimisation step I'll have to tackle anyway.

[jfhbrook]

function on request

I'm not sure what you mean here.

I assumed that this would be a backwards-compatible change to opts.cache where keys can be regexps or some other sort of route matcher, and values would correspond to the cache value. But I haven't thought about it too hard.

[grrowl]

Sorry, I was a little rushed. Something like this:

var opts = {
  cache: function (req) {
    if (req.url.indexOf('assets/') === 0)
      return 21600;
    else
      return 3600;
  }
}

It would provide more flexibility and better performance than restricting matching to regexes IMO.

[jfhbrook]

Yeah okay, I see what you're saying. Seems easier to implement for sure.

Yeah, I'd take a PR for that.

[TehShrike]

That pull request never materialized apparently? :-) I could use this, and the function mechanism seems perfect to me.

[jfhbrook]

Yeah, to my recollection no PR.

[grrowl]

👍 unfortunately we changed course and didn't need this functionality, kudos to @TehShrike for addressing this

[TehShrike]

Oh, I don't care about you guys, I need this! ;-) <3