Question about static file serving strategy with S3 and Cloudfront

[Chen Xu]

Hi Everyone,

I am currently using the following strategy to serve my static files, basically I run collectstatic to copy all my files to my static files directory, and then move it to s3, and cloudfront will pick it up from there. However, I wonder if I set the cache period to be 1 day in my cloudfront, and I upload new updated files to s3, are the files still going to be the old ones until next time the cache expires?

Thanks

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⚡ Chen Xu ⚡

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

You also have to consider client side caching, despite if you use the correct headers or not.

One option is to use a cache buster using a value which changes on each release, but I'd advise against using random() cache buster as your caching efficiency will be impacted.

//example.com/static/images.jpg?release=1000

//example.com/static/images.jpg?release=1001

Cal

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[Scott Anderson]

This is what we do, although we don't use query strings as some network appliances don't respect them with respect to caching.

We use a virtual directory instead:

//example.com/static/<git version>/images/blancmange.png

Where <git version> is obtained like this:

$ git log --oneline | wc -l | awk '{ print $1; }'

And nginx removes the virtual directory like this:

    location ~ /static/([0-9]+)/ {

        rewrite ^/static/([0-9]+)/(.+)$ /static/$2 last;

    }

Static files are cached for a year:

    location /static {

        alias {{ web_static_dir }};

        expires 1y;

        add_header Cache-Control "no-transform,public,max-age=31557600,s-maxage=31557600";

        gzip on;

    }

So a static file will be cached "forever" unless we do a release, at which point the virtual directory changes to the new version and clients start requesting (to them) a completely new static file.

Also note we don't copy to S3 as there's no way to do the virtual directory without having a real directory for every release. CloudFront will read files from a web site as well, and we don't need the extra deployment complexity.

Regards,

-scott

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

Also worth mentioning that django-pipeline does cache busting by adding a random string into the filename, rather than query string, so you may be able to extend on that for your own needs.

Cal

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