fastify-disablecache's Introduction

fastify-disablecache

Fastify plugin to disable client-side caching

Overview

Inspired by nocache, the fastify-disablecache plugin sets the following response headers and values to disable client-side caching:

Cache-Control: no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Surrogate-Control: no-store

This plugin was created out of a need for an easy way to disable client-side caching for data received from backend APIs. This ensures data is always current when called by applications.

Why these headers?

Cache-Control - Primary response header for configuring cache controls since HTTP/1.1; whilst no-store is the directive to disable caching, clients such as Internet Explorer did not use it, thus the addition of max-age=0, must-revalidate
Expires - Included for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0 caches
Pragma - Included for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0 caches, was used by Internet Explorer
Surrogate-Control - Not a standardised response header but is used by CDNs and reverse proxies for cache control

Installation

Install using npm:

npm i fastify-disablecache

For Fastify v3.x support, use [email protected].

Example usage

const Fastify = require("fastify");
const disableCache = require("fastify-disablecache");

const server = Fastify();
server.register(disableCache);

server.get("/", (_req, res) => {
	res.send("ok");
});

server.listen(3000, (err) => {
	if (err) throw err;
	console.log("Server listening on 3000");
});