Laravel and Google app engine flex environment. Set cache control in nginx config not working

Question

I'm building a laravel application and I'm trying to enable browser caching.

I tried to set expires/cache-control in a custom nginx-app.conf file located in my application root. (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/php/reference/app-yaml)

Content of nginx-app.conf:

location ~* \.(?:css(\.map)?|js(\.map)?|jpe?g|png|gif|ico|cur|heic|webp|tiff?|mp3|m4a|aac|ogg|midi?|wav|mp4|mov|webm|mpe?g|avi|ogv|flv|wmv|svgz?|ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|woff2) {
  expires 30d;
  add_header Pragma public;
  add_header Cache-Control "max-age: 2592000,public";
}

But the headers still contain the default cache-control of 600 seconds from google.

cache-control: max-age=600
cache-control: public
content-encoding: gzip
content-type: text/css
date: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 10:19:07 GMT
etag: W/"5d03719d-6ffe"
expires: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 10:29:07 GMT
last-modified: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 10:06:21 GMT
server: nginx
status: 200
vary: Accept-Encoding
via: 1.1 google

saccodd saccodd · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-30T20:05:54

I had similar problems with caching in Nginx on GAE flex and I was not able to find a fix on the reverse proxy.

My guess is that you have to wait for those files to expire and then you'll see the new cache-control.

I find GAE very limiting from this point of view, didn't experience this situation on AWS for example.

A workaround at the application layer is

cache busting / versioning of the static files (you can see this example for Sails.js)
adding cache headers to requests (same link, following comment)

Laravel and Google app engine flex environment. Set cache control in nginx config not working

1 Answers