PHP cache header override

Question

I've been through over 100 answers here, lots to try, NOTHING working??

Have a PHP based site. I need caching OFF for all .php files EXCEPT A SELECT FEW.

So, in .htaccess, I have the following:

ExpiresActive On
# Eliminate caching for certain dynamic files
<FilesMatch "\.(php|cgi|pl)$">
ExpiresDefault A0
Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

Using Firebug, I see the following:

Cache-Control   no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0, proxy-revalidate, no-transform
Connection  Keep-Alive
Content-Type    text/html
Date    Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:22:27 GMT
Expires Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:22:27 GMT
Keep-Alive  timeout=3, max=100
Pragma  no-cache
Server  Apache
Transfer-Encoding   chunked
X-Powered-By    PHP/5.2.17

Hey, Looks great!

BUT, I have a couple .php pages I need some very short caching on.

I thought the simple answer was having this added to the very top of each php page in which I want caching enabled:

<?php header("Cache-Control: max-age=360"); ?>

Nope.

Then I tried various versions of the above. Nope.

Then I tried meta http-equiv variations. Nope.

Then I tried variations of the .htaccess code along with the above variations, such as limiting it to:

# Eliminate caching for certain dynamic files
<FilesMatch "\.(php|cgi|pl)$">
Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, max-age=0"
</FilesMatch>

Nope.

It seems nothing I do will allow a single .php to be cache enabled with the .htaccess code in place, short of removing the statements from the .htaccess file altogether.

Where am I going wrong? What do I have to do to get individual php pages to be cacheable while the rest remain off??

Thank you for any thoughts.

Answer 1

Well, apparently this has no answer. So, my solution at this point is to eliminate the .htaccess code altogether, and apply explicit headers to each file. A pain in the you-know-what but it's time to move on. If anyone has a more elegant solution that can work with an .htaccess default please feel free to share... thanks

Answer 2

So I know I'm late.. maybe too late. but I came across a simular problem, and I thought I'd share my solution.

Basically, I turned ExpiresActive Off for every file I didn't want to be cached (or have different caching times than my static resources). It looked something like this:

ExpiresActive On

<FilesMatch "\.(php|cgi|pl)$">

  # This makes sure that no cache headers can be set,
  # but does not generate an error when trying to.
  ExpiresActive Off

</FilesMatch>

# Your normal caching here
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

Now over in your PHP script, you should be able to insert caching headers without them being overwritten by your .htaccess file, just like you were doing

<?php header('Expires: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time() + 360) . ' GMT'); ?>

Hope this was helpfull.

Answer 3

This answer had the solution for me: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4521120/2685496

Little did I know that session_start(); by default overwrites your Cache-control and Expires headers with values to ensure the page is not cached.

You can use session_cache_limiter('public'); before session_start(); , like Marcin suggests, or you can just put your header(); statements after session_start(); .