How to Setup FastCGI Caching with Nginx on your VPS

Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.4.1 Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 02:55:23 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Connection: close Vary: Accept-Encoding X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.10-1ubuntu3.8 X-Pingback: http://mydomain/xmlrpc.php Link: http://mydomain/?p=2138; rel=shortlink rt-Fastcgi-Cache: HIT

Does previous lines mean the cache works? Why “Connection: close” always close?

Thanks!

@handytutorial: Yes – <code>rt-Fastcgi-Cache: HIT</code> means that it was served from the cache.

this tutorial is very hard to follow and understand. My nginx couldn’t start at all.

@PigGy: Can you check the file at /var/log/nginx/error.log for any error and post them here.

@handytutorial: The Connection: close indicates the end of the HTTP connection.

From www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.10

HTTP/1.1 defines the “close” connection option for the sender to signal that the connection will be closed after completion of the response

@jesin.a: I destroyed the 2 droplets and recreated a fresh droplet to follow your tutorial again. this time i skipped the section /* droplet’s RAM + Swap */ because I not familiar with the settings and I want to save time to recreate a fresh droplet so to show you my error.log and other information as below.

/var/log/nginx/error.log： http://pastebin.com/nUXZxiKN

/var/www/site1/wordpress/purge.php： http://pastebin.com/EMxAWbP1

/etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress： http://pastebin.com/rF885i2Y

Putty： curl -d ‘url=http://www.example.com/time.php’ http://localhost/purge.php http://pastebin.com/QMcV2xyx

@PigGy: What version of nginx are you using?<pre>nginx -v</pre>

@Kamal Nasser My version: <pre>nginx version: nginx/1.4.3 </pre>

@PigGy: Are you still experiencing this issue? It’s a bit odd, since $request_uri is valid and you’re not running a ridiculously old version of nginx so it should exist.

@Kamal Nasser I still facing the problem. I wouldn’t dare run Sudo Reboot because if I reboot my nginx webserver couldn’t start-up at all.

@PigGy: Does it work if you just browse to / and not /purge.php? Try creating a file with <pre><?php phpinfo();</pre> as its contents – does it work?

@Kamal Nasser Do you have any email for me to send you my ip and pw for putty login?

@PigGy I’m the one who wrote this article you can get in touch with me using the “contact me” form of my blog http://jesin.tk/contact-me/

The “nocache” entries must be above the “location ~ .php$ {” line.

Also “/etc/nginx/cache” must be writable by the “www-data” user (chown it).

Sorry for missing out these points. You may contact me if you still face issues.

Also as far as I’ve seen WordPress installations must use the following “try_files”

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;

Thanks for this tutorial. I’d like to add logging… I tried adding this in my vhost config (just after fastcgi_cache_path above server section): log_format custom '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ’ '“$request” $status $body_bytes_sent ’ ‘“$http_referer” “$http_user_agent” nocache:$no_cache’; access_log /var/log/nginx/microcache.log custom;

I checked if the folder had the right permissions… and it had… microcache.log is always 0 bytes…

@multiformeingegno The <a href=“http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLogModule#log_format”>log_format</a> directive should be placed only in the <code>http { }</code> directive.

To log cache statuses place the following in the <strong>nginx.conf</strong> file.

<pre>log_format custom '$remote_addr - $upstream_cache_status [$time_local] ’ '“$request” $status $body_bytes_sent ’ ‘“$http_referer” “$http_user_agent”’; access_log /var/log/nginx/microcache.log custom;</pre>

Notice the use of the <code>$upstream_cache_status</code> variable.

Excellent tutorial. Thank you.

I really like that also explain some of the inner workings and procided us with the purge script. It really helps understanding what is going on.

I get everything to work exactly as described but, I cannot get caching to work for my wordpress site. If I put time.php in my wordpress folder it gets cached but none of my other dynamic content from wordpress does.

Do you have any idea what might be the problem?

Below is my nginx virtual server for wordpress. I have removed the SSL settings which are standard and I have a SSL redirect server listening on port 80.

fastcgi_cache_path /etc/nginx/cache keys_zone=MYAPP:100m inactive=60m; fastcgi_cache_key “$request_method$host$request_uri”;

add_header X-Cache $upstream_cache_status;

server { listen 443 ssl; server_name example.com www.example.com; root /var/www/example.com;

    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
	rewrite ^/sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last; ## enables xml-site-maps
	rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last; ## enables xml-site-maps
	
	try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; ## enables pretty permalinks
            }

    error_page 404 /404.html;
   
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
           root /usr/share/nginx/html;
           }

    location ~ \.php$ {
           fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; #I have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini
       
           fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
           fastcgi_index index.php;
           include fastcgi_params;

       fastcgi_cache MYAPP;
       fastcgi_cache_valid any 1m;
           }

    location ~ /\.ht {
           deny all;
           }

@micke The configuration directives are difficult to read please paste them at pastebin.com and share the link.

How do you say that caching is not working, did you check for the X-Cache HTTP header?

@jesin.a

Apparently, there was an update that garbled my post.

I found the problem with my set-up and I am posting it here for others that might experience the same problem. nginx will not cache pages that set cookies by default. Adding the following line fixed the problem:

fastcgi_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires Set-Cookie;

FYI: md5 is not an encryption algorithm. It is a hash algorithm.

Great post. Thanks a lot!

@a1099028: You’re correct, I’ll update the article. Thanks!

I found that cache works in some pages of my site, not all of them.

I created an advanced time.php, it can receive a value by GET then print it out. It works perfect and shows the “X-Cache: Hit” header. But some of my original programs still fail to cache. Why ?

(Cache:Hit) my time.php: http://55555.tw/time.php?var=1 (Cache:Miss) my original php: http://55555.tw/index.php?GoodsCountryID=1 (Cache:Hit) http://55555.tw (Cache:Miss) http://55555.tw/index.php

part of my nginx server setting: http://pastebin.com/vQHZZdbE

my fastcgi_params: http://pastebin.com/Gu1PLbCK

part of my php.ini : cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Is it possible to make the fastcgi_cache_valid time dynamic? For instance I’d like to cache some resources for much longer than others. I’ve tried a setup like the one below with no luck.

if ($request_uri ~* ^/ajax/getters/feed.php){ set $cache_time “5m”; } . . . fastcgi_cache_valid 200 301 302 304 $cache_time;

@bmulley, Is the if statement inside of a location block?

My cache folder is owned by www-data:www-data. The permission on the folder is drwxrwsr-x

fastcgi_cache creates subfolders inside it with the permission drwx–S— and cache files have the permission -rw-------

nginx and PHP-FPM are running under www-data.

I cannot browse the cache subfolders using another user in www-data group. I can’t purge the contents of those subfolders via PHP. I get permission denied.

Do you know what I am doing wrong?

Thanks!

@Habib The subfolder permission says it all, drwx–S— means the group has NO permissions on the directory. But you should be able to purge it via PHP.

How are you executing the PHP purge script? Through the php command or through the web server?

My issue with this configuration is that the cache folder is always empty and nothing is being cached.

permission: drwxr-xr-x (755) owner/group: www-data www-data

Bonth nginx and PHP-FPM are running under www-data.

log_format custom ‘$upstream_cache_status’; The $upstream_cache_status returns "- ".

@info: Try commenting all the cache exception if blocks and restarting nginx. Does it work with them disabled?

@Kamal Nasser

I removed almost all the config, leaving it on bare minimum. You can check my configs on: https://github.com/FabianGabor/nginx/

and also the time.php on with the rt-Fastcgi-Cache:MISS header: http://direct.fabiangabor.com/time.php

Does the purging script allow wildcard?

Eg, /mypath/*

If not, how can this be done?

Hi Jesin,

Thanks for the tutorial. I have installed and tested it on a small server. The performance is awesome! My site does not have many updates a day so this is a great solution without using plugins in Wordpress. And now i can configure it how i want it.

(i have also compare your nginx solution with Apache and some cache plugins in Wordpress on the same small server, but nginx is the winner in my case).

Greetz,

Berto van Oorspronk.

hello How to enable “fastcgi_cache_path” because it shows me this, like this, this directive does not exist in my installation of nginx

nginx -t
nginx: [emerg] "fastcgi_cache_path" directive is not allowed here in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:142
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed```

thank you

Mich

hello

it is added on server {}

I was always the error message

Did I forget to add a function in me install nginx?

Type --with-

thank you

Mich

I am trying to set a separate cache for all login users.

#Don't cache if there is a cookie called SESS
if ($http_cookie ~ SESS)
{
    set $no_cache 1;
}

After login to the CMS (Drupal), notice in X-Cache header in browser is displaying bypass. After commenting it out, X-Cache header is always a miss.

I am guessing the cache-control, expire headers are preventing pages the pages from being cached?

cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0

Are there any solutions to cache login users too?

Cheers! dropchew

Hello, when i logged in to my admin panel then for the time of caching all people that go to the website they see the admin panel on top of the page. Can we eliminate that?

It’s better to enable cache revalidation with the fastcgi_cache_revalidate directive. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_fastcgi_module.html#fastcgi_cache_revalidate

Is this tutorial can be implemented in nginx as proxy in front of apache?

Or I have to use this [(https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-nginx-http-proxying-load-balancing-buffering-and-caching](http://)) to leverage nginx caching?

Thanks

Great stuff! I use Magento. I had to add:

fastcgi_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires Set-Cookie; 

otherwise it wouldn’t cache. Is this actually correct?

As I use magento I have a problem which I don’t know how to solve with:

if ($request_uri ~* "/(page-I-dont-want-to-cache/|file-I-dont-want-to-cache.php)")
{
    set $no_cache 1;
}```


My Problem: If I visit product A first, then it would be stored in the cache. If I then go to product B and add it into my shopping cart I get a little icon above the cart that indicates that I have one product in my cart. But when I go back to product A that was already cached, the little icon that indicates how many products I have in my cart isn't displayed anymore, That's because I am on a page that was stored in the cache before... 

What could be done about this issue? 

this is how my setup looks like for the URL's I don't want to cache:

Thanks!

Hi @jesin , thanks for great article. I am using wordpress. Is there a way to update post meta with this cache when post url is requested?