cache-control

[selfagency]

for some reason when i enable express-static-gzip, it ignores the cache-control headers i set for my public folder with express.static. it should have max-age=604800 but instead my brotli and gzip compressed files return with max-age=0. i've also tried using other express caching middleware, but even though it works on my pages, it won't work on static assets served via brotli. how, then, can i set max-age of these objects?

  // static assets
  const oneYear = { maxAge: 604800000 }
  const staticFiles = [
    { file: 'browserconfig.xml', path: 'public/browserconfig.xml' },
    { file: 'favicon.ico', path: 'assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico' },
    { file: 'favicon', path: 'assets/img/favicon/' },
    { file: 'manifest.json', path: 'public/manifest.json' },
    { file: 'package.json', path: './package.json' },
    { file: 'public', path: 'public/' },
    { file: 'sw.js', path: './sw.js' }
  ]

  let robotsEnv
  process.env.ENVIRONMENT === 'production' ? robotsEnv = 'production' : robotsEnv = 'development'
  staticFiles.push({ file: 'robots.txt', path: `public/robots.txt.${robotsEnv}` })

  if (process.env.ENVIRONMENT === 'local') {
    staticFiles.push({ file: 'assets', path: 'assets/' })
    staticFiles.push({ file: 'src', path: 'src/' })
  }

  app.use('/public/', expressStaticGzip(`${process.env.DOC_ROOT}public/`, { enableBrotli: true }))

  for (let file of staticFiles) {
    app.use(`/${file.file}`, express.static(`${process.env.DOC_ROOT}${file.path}`, oneYear))
  }

  app.use(cacheControl({
    maxAge: 1800,
    public: true
  }))

[tkoenig89]

Hi,

You might want to take a look at the readme of serve-static which is used by express-static-gzip for serving the files. All request made to express-static-gzip will only be changed to a matching compressed file and will the be forwarded to serve-static. You can also pass options to serve-static by adding these to the options object of express-static-gzip.
As serve-static has cacheControl and maxAge options this should solve your issue i guess (without having used this my self before).

Should look something like this:

app.use('/public/', expressStaticGzip(`${process.env.DOC_ROOT}public/`, { 
   enableBrotli: true,
   cacheControl: true, //optional as serve-static already defaults this to 'true'
   maxAge: 604800000 //ms
 }))

[selfagency]

i tried that but there was no change in behavior. in your code it doesn't seem that you're passing through serve-static options.

[tkoenig89]

So i just did a debug session on express-static-gzip and it does correctly pass it's options down to serve-static, which is passing the maxAge option to send. I did this with the following simple example and a folder containing a dummy index.html and a index.html.gz file:

const static = require("express-static-gzip"); //version 0.3.0
const express = require("express");

let app = express();

app.use("", static("static", {
    maxAge:20000,    
}));

app.listen(8080);

Opening my browser gives me a Cache-Control Header and the max-age in Seconds:

Changing the code to use a different maxAge like this:

//...

app.use("", static("static", {
    maxAge:604800000 ,    
}));

//...

Yields the according Header:

Following these observations i might suspect an issue with your setup. Maybe there are issues arising because you serve files with different middlewares from the same path. If you are using express-static-gzip you don't need to serve the original files (e.g. 'index.html') with serve-static (or express.static). Just place index.html and index.html.gz next to each other and point express-static-gzip to the folder.

[tkoenig89]

Closed due to inactivity. Feel free to reopen if this is still relevant.

[victorpavlenko]

@koenig89 are u sure this is in secconds?

[tkoenig89]

@victorpavlenko you might want to check the specification of cache-control and max-age to verify the header should be in seconds. But configuring it via the serve-static middleware (which I forward all settings to) seems to require milliseconds. So i guess this might lead to some confusions.