Passenger/Apache: Can't set expire headers for versioned resources (rewrite rule not recognized)

Question

I'm trying to set the expire headers for Rails' auto-versioned resources, like whatever.css?1234567890 . (I don't want to set the expire headers for unversioned resources.) The only method I could find online involved two steps: 1) rewrite all urls that end in 10 digits to load from /public/add_expires_header instead of from /public, where add_expires_header is a symlink that points to /public 2) Add an expiry date to all files from add_expires_header.

Seems like a good idea -- but passenger doesn't seem to recognize the rewrite rule, as indicated by the below curl results.

(Note: a lot of people seemed to think they could accomplish my goal using FilesMatch, but I read elsewhere that FilesMatch can't see the query string.)

#from sites_enabled/sitename in the  tags
...
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^[0-9]{10}$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /add_expires_header%{REQUEST_URI} [QSA]

  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 years"

...

-----
#curl indicates that rewrite rule isn't taking effect

manu@Blade-Server:~$ curl -I -L "http://x.com/stylesheets/style.css?1249092148"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:07:49 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) Phusion_Passenger/2.2.4 PHP/5.2.6-3ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch
Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:02:28 GMT
ETag: "455b-2fbb-4700aedc5f500"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 12219
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/css

manu@Blade-Server:~$ curl -I -L "http://x.com/add_expires_header/stylesheets/style.css?1249092148"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:07:55 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) Phusion_Passenger/2.2.4 PHP/5.2.6-3ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch
Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:02:28 GMT
ETag: "455b-2fbb-4700aedc5f500"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 12219
Cache-Control: max-age=31536000
Expires: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:07:55 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/css

I've also tried including the rewrite stuff in apache2.conf, httpd.conf, and public/.htacess

Roger Ertesvag Roger Ertesvag · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-23T09:16:25

I prefer to do this by combining it with using an assets host on a separate subdomain to avoid the whole rewrite issue. That way you can set the expire headers for everything on that subdomain. You can activate this in rails in environments/production.rb.

If you don't want to go with a separate subdomain I think the code below should do it, although I have not tested it myself:

ExpiresActive On
  <FilesMatch "\.(ico|gif|jpe?g|png|js|css)$">
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
  </FilesMatch>

Passenger/Apache: Can't set expire headers for versioned resources (rewrite rule not recognized)

1 Answers