npm package discovery and stats viewer.

Discover Tips

  • General search

    [free text search, go nuts!]

  • Package details

    pkg:[package-name]

  • User packages

    @[username]

Sponsor

Optimize Toolset

I’ve always been into building performant and accessible sites, but lately I’ve been taking it extremely seriously. So much so that I’ve been building a tool to help me optimize and monitor the sites that I build to make sure that I’m making an attempt to offer the best experience to those who visit them. If you’re into performant, accessible and SEO friendly sites, you might like it too! You can check it out at Optimize Toolset.

About

Hi, 👋, I’m Ryan Hefner  and I built this site for me, and you! The goal of this site was to provide an easy way for me to check the stats on my npm packages, both for prioritizing issues and updates, and to give me a little kick in the pants to keep up on stuff.

As I was building it, I realized that I was actually using the tool to build the tool, and figured I might as well put this out there and hopefully others will find it to be a fast and useful way to search and browse npm packages as I have.

If you’re interested in other things I’m working on, follow me on Twitter or check out the open source projects I’ve been publishing on GitHub.

I am also working on a Twitter bot for this site to tweet the most popular, newest, random packages from npm. Please follow that account now and it will start sending out packages soon–ish.

Open Software & Tools

This site wouldn’t be possible without the immense generosity and tireless efforts from the people who make contributions to the world and share their work via open source initiatives. Thank you 🙏

© 2024 – Pkg Stats / Ryan Hefner

connect-cachify

v0.0.17

Published

Connect middleware to provide easy frontend caching.

Downloads

586

Readme

build status

Cachify

connect-cachify makes having proper browser cache and HTTP caching behavior for assets easier.

It is a set of middleware and view helper functions for the Node.js express framework.

This does not provide in-memory caching, middleware caching, or many other types of caching. Cachify is focused on reducing the number of HTTP requests to your web nodes.

Installation

npm install connect-cachify

How to Use

Instructions below are for Express 2, but Express 3 and 4 are also supported.

var app,
    express = require('express'),
    cachify = require('connect-cachify'),

app = express.createServer();

Middleware

var assets = {
    "/js/main.min.js": [
      '/js/lib/jquery.js',
      '/js/magick.js',
      '/js/laughter.js'
    ],
    "/css/home.min.css": [
      '/css/reset.css',
      '/css/home.css'
    ],
    "/css/dashboard.min.css": [
      '/css/reset.css',
      '/css/common.css'
      '/css/dashboard.css'
    ]
};

var url_to_paths = {
  '/js/jquery.js': '/home/development/jquery/jquery.js',
  '/css/reset.css': '/home/development/css-reset/reset.css'
};

app.use(cachify.setup(assets, {
  root: __dirname,
  url_to_paths: url_to_paths,
  production: your_config['use_minified_assets']
}));

setup takes two parameters: assets and options. Assets is an associative array where the keys are your production urls, and the value is a list of development urls that produce the same asset.

We'll discussion options in a section below.

Cachify middleware is now enabled. Let's look at this after hooking up the view helpers.

Note: You must put cachify.setup before static or other connect middleware which works with these same requests.

In an EJS template

...
<head>
  <title>Dashboard: Hamsters of North America</title>
  <%- cachify_css('/css/dashboard.min.css') %>
</head>
<body>
...
  <%- cachify_js('/js/main.min.js') %>
</body>
...

In a Jade template

...
title= Dashboard: Hamsters of North America
meta(charset='utf-8')
| !{cachify_css('/css/dashboard.min.css')}
...
body
...
  | !{cachify_js('/js/main.min.js')}
  block scripts

In production mode, a call to cachify_js will produce a single script tag like:

<script src="/js/fa6d51a13a245a90aeb48eeca0e52396/main.min.js"></script>

When production was set to false, cachify_js will produce:

<script src="/js/lib/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="/js/magick.js"></script>
<script src="/js/laughter.js"></script>

The middleware makes caching transparent. A request for /fa6d51a13a245a90aeb48eeca0e52396/js/main.min.js will have the req.url rewritten to /js/main.min.js, so that other middleware will work properly.

The middleware sets the cache expiration headers to the Mayan Apocalypse, and does it's best to ensure browsers won't request that version of /js/main.min.js again.

A goal is for this module to work well with other connect compilers, such as LESS or connect-assets.

Options

The following are optional config for cachify.setup

  • root - Path where static assets are stored on disk. Same value as you'd pass to the static middleware.

  • url_to_paths - an associative array of URLs to absolute filename paths. Useful to specify paths to files that are not in the root directory.

  • production - Boolean indicating if your in development or production mode. Effects how links for js and css files are generated.

  • debug - Boolean indicating we should always re-write urls with a hash.

For full details, see the API documentation.

Magick

So how does cachify work?

When you cachify a url, it adds an MD5 hash of the file's contents into the URL it generates:

http://example.com/cbcb1e865e61c08a68a4e0bfa293e806/stylo.css

Incoming requests are checked for this MD5 hash. If present and if we' know about the resource (either via options or the file exists on disk), then the request path is rewritten back to /stylo.css, so that another route can process the request.

These requests are served up with expires headers that are very long lived, so a user's browser will only request them once.

Cachify doesn't attempt to find an older version of your resource, if the MD5 has was for an older file.

Status

This module is brand spanking new. Please file issues with ideas, bugs, etc.

It was created as part of the BrowserID project.

Debugging

To debug cachify's hashed url behavior, pass in the following parameter in your options block:

setup({ debug: true, ...});

Now even in development mode, cache busting URLs will be generated, so you can troubleshoot any problems cachify magick is causing you.

Development

Patches are welcome! To run unit tests...

nodeunit test

Wordpress Cachify

Does this all sound like gobbledygook? Maybe you're looking for Wordpress cachify plugin instead of connect-cachify.