fastify-disablecache

Fastify plugin to disable client-side caching

Intro

Inspired by nocache, the fastify-disablecache plugin sets the following response headers and values to disable client-side caching:

Cache-Control: no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Surrogate-Control: no-store

This plugin was created out of a need for an easy way to disable client-side caching for data received from backend APIs at Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. This ensures patient data is always current when called by applications.

Why These Headers?

Cache-Control - Primary response header for configuring cache controls since HTTP/1.1; whilst no-store is the directive to disable caching, certain clients (such as Internet Explorer) did not use it, thus the addition of max-age=0, must-revalidate
Expires - Included for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0 caches
Pragma - Included for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0 caches, was used by Internet Explorer
Surrogate-Control - Not a standardised response header but is used by CDNs and reverse proxies for cache control

Installation

Install using npm:

npm install fastify-disablecache

Or yarn:

yarn add fastify-disablecache

fastify-disablecache's test scripts use npm commands.

Example Usage

const Fastify = require("fastify");
const disableCache = require("fastify-disablecache");

const server = Fastify();
server.register(disableCache);

server.get("/", (req, res) => {
	res.send("ok");
});

server.listen(3000);

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and any help is greatly appreciated!

See the contributing guide for details on how to get started. Please adhere to this project's Code of Conduct when contributing.

Acknowledgements

Evan Hahn - nocache developer
Matteo Collina - Optimisation suggestions

License

fastify-disablecache is licensed under the MIT license.

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