http caching headers about fastify

[cagataycali]

Fastify can have a cache solution as a plugin? like these but internal one.🤔

[mcollina]

IMHO we have two layers of this.

1. methods to detect and process those headers in Request
2. a plugin that uses those, and actually do caching

Would you like to start a plugin?

[jsumners]

Reference for people wishing to tackle this issue: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.9

[allevo]

But why should this be in fastify?
Cannot this be a plugin that installs some kind of middleware?

Is yes, why is this needed for the v1.0.0 release?

[mcollina]

@allevo I mean we need to support what is written in https://hapijs.com/tutorials/caching?lang=en_US as "client side caching" within fastify itself, and maybe server-side caching with plugin.

[jsumners]

Oooh, okay. That gives me ideas....

[allevo]

@mcollina fastify can simply parsing the header if we want (but again, why not in a middleware?) or provide a simple shorthand to set the cache header (but again, why not in a decorator?)

[evanshortiss]

ETag support out of the box is great since it can save clients significant bandwidth, e.g for mobile devices consuming an API. Similar for other cache headers @jsumners linked.

I think things like apicache or my own express-expeditious fall into a different category.

[evanshortiss]

Of course, performance-wise it might be best as a plugin - just sharing thoughts on general use case.

[mcollina]

Etag support out of the box destroys performance :/. After we have spent time generating a response, our cost has already been paid, and bandwidth is mostly cheap. 304s are better sent from a web server (nginx) or a CDN.

IMHO we should just provide some utilities to implement all of that if someone needs to. It’s a bunch of methods/accessors on Request and Reply.

[jsumners]

Here's my initial implementation. I intend to look at catbox style support before an actual release. https://github.com/fastify/fastify-caching

[mcollina]

good job! we need the accessor on Request as well!

[jsumners]

@mcollina file bugs over on that repo so they can be a TODO list.

[delvedor]

This can be closed, further discussion could be done in fastify/fastify-caching :)

[jsumners]

Fixed by https://github.com/fastify/fastify-caching/releases/tag/v1.0.0