Ruby Forum Mongrel > expires header for .css

I'm using mongrel as my http server.

I was using yslow to evaluate the performance of my web site and noticed
I was downloading the .css file on every request???  I use one .css file
for the whole site and I though I would be cached?

Yslow indicates that there is no expires date/time set for the css file.

How can I tell mongrel to send an expires header with my static content?

thanks,
Scott

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Scott Derrick <lists@ruby-forum.com> 
wrote:
>  How can I tell mongrel to send an expires header with my static content?

Seems Ben Schwarz ran into the same:

http://germanforblack.com/2007/extreme-expires-headers-for-nginx-and-mongrel


Would this come into play?

$ tail -3 config/environments/production.rb
# Don't want asset-ids
# Want browser caching
ENV['RAILS_ASSET_ID'] = '' # blank.


Stephan
--
Stephan Wehner

-> http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
-> http://www.thrackle.org
-> http://www.buckmaster.ca
-> http://www.trafficlife.com
-> http://stephansmap.org

Is your webserver directly talking to users or are you using a proxy?

You can do this in mongrel, but generally you can configure your proxy 
to
serve these files directly.  It's much faster to serve them statically.

For nginx, you can use the following...
http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxRubyonRailsMongrel

in your server block, add the following (it will statically serve and 
set
the expiration date to the maximum allowed for images, javascript and 
css).

location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ {
  if (-f $request_filename) {
    expires      max;
    break;
  }
}

Note that you'll have to make sure that when you change
css/javascript/images to either create a new file or add query 
parameters to
defeat the caching (this is done for you in rails by default).
Additionally, if you're dynamically rendering CSS or JS, then this will
break as well.

Also make sure that you've configured gzip compression for text files
(css/javascript) in nginx as well.  This will also give you a big speed
improvement for most of your clients.

- scott

Scott Windsor wrote:
> Is your webserver directly talking to users or are you using a proxy?

At this point mongrel is talking directly to the users.   I've been 
looking at nginx but since I'm in a critical phase of development right 
now I didn't want to enter any new services at this time.

> 
> You can do this in mongrel, but generally you can configure your proxy 

Yes I would like to do this in mongrel. Pre recomendation I added this 
to my environmnet.rb

  if defined? Mongrel::DirHandler
    module Mongrel
      class DirHandler
        def send_file_with_expires(req_path, request, response, 
header_only=false)
          response.header['Cache-Control'] = 'max-age=315360000'
          response.header['Expires'] = (Time.now + 10.years).rfc2822
          send_file_without_expires(req_path, request, response, 
header_only)
        end
        alias_method :send_file_without_expires, :send_file
        alias_method :send_file, :send_file_with_expires
      end
    end
  end
 but it doesn't add the expires header to the css file.

thanks for your help in this matter,

Scott