connect-entity-cache

HTTP entity cache with conditional GET support.

connect-entity-cache is a very simple in-memory cache for caching HTTP entities (i.e. contents of files, or some dynamicly generated content), provided as Connect middleware. It supports conditional GET requests (based on If-Last-Modified and/or If-None-Match request headers) for maximum efficiency.

Usinge the cache is a bit like Amazon S3: You need to supply both the entity (file) contents and any headers that you want to be sent with a HTTP response that's served from the cache. Also like S3, you can add content that has already been gzipped, making gzipping at a later stage unnecessary.

The main difference from S3 is that the cache does not have a concept of folders. All entities are uniquely identified by their resource path.

Usage

var ConnectEntityCache = require("connect-entity-cache")
var connect = require("connect")
 
var cache = new ConnectEntityCache({log: console.log})
cache.cacheEntity("/",new Buffer("Hello World"),{"content-type":"text/plain"})
var app = connect()
app.use(cache)

Configuration

You can pass a log and a warn function to the ConnectEntityCache constructor in an options object, as log and warn, respectively. log defaults to a noop, warn defaults to console.warn.

Notes

• connect-entity-cache uses infer-entity-headers to infer entity headers.
• You can provide response headers you want to be sent along. These will always take precedence.
• If you pass a string instead of a buffer as entity, then the string is assumed to be UTF-8.
• You can cache gzipped entities. Just make sure you add "content-encoding": "gzip" to the headers.
• There can be only one entity for each path. There is no content-negotiation.
• There's currently no way to remove cached entities.
• connect-entity-cache also properly responds to HEAD and OPTIONS requests.

Credits

The initial structure of this module was generated by Jumpstart, using the Jumpstart Black Coffee template.

License

connect-entity-cache is released under the MIT License.
Copyright (c) 2013 Meryn Stol