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evilpenguin
Asked: 2011-07-08 03:07:43 +0800 CST

How do I alter the Last-Modified header on nginx?

  • 772

My server returns the following headers:

Cache-Control:no-cache
Connection:keep-alive
Date:Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:41:57 GMT
Expires:Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
Last-Modified:Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:06:32 GMT
Server:nginx/0.8.46`

I want the content I'm serving not to be cached, so I'm looking for a way to return a Last-Modified header that contains the date-time when the request was originated. Something like now()...

cache web-server nginx http-headers

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    "I want the content I'm serving not to be cached" : You can turn off If-Modified-Since request header checking with if_modified_since off; directive. if_modified_since doc

    And about Last-Modified header: You can turn it off with add_header Last-Modified "";

    • 10

  2. You may want to make it look like a file is always modified:

    add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
if_modified_since off;
etag off;

    As for the last line, if you really want to hide a true last-modified date, then you must hide the ETag header too since it leaks timestamps.

    • 6

  3. I've honestly spent a whole day on this and not closer to getting Nginx to play along properly especially with the way Nginx incorrectly formats the Last-Modified: Date header which is not within the RFC's for a Last-Modified header.

    I found this solution however which, if you are using PHP, works just fine and can be tweaked as you need. Hope it helps. Just include this at the very top of your .php pages before the rest of your code.

    <?php
//get the last-modified-date of this very file
$lastModified=filemtime(__FILE__);
//get a unique hash of this file (etag)
$etagFile = md5_file(__FILE__);
//get the HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE header if set
$ifModifiedSince=(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'] : false);
//get the HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH header if set (etag: unique file hash)
$etagHeader=(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH']) ? trim($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH']) : false);

//set last-modified header
header("Last-Modified: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", $lastModified)." GMT");
//set etag-header
//header("Etag: $etagFile");
header("ETag: \"$etagFile\"");
//make sure caching is turned on
header('Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=3600');

//check if page has changed. If not, send 304 and exit
if (@strtotime($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'])==$lastModified || $etagHeader == $etagFile)
{
       header("HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified");
       header("Vary: Accept-Encoding");
       exit;
}
?>

    Then test your site at redbot.org and www.hscripts.com

    UPDATE:

    1. Added sending the vary header with the 304 not modified response (required)
    2. Modified Cache:Control header max-age can be tweaked to your own needs.
    3. To give credit where it is due, I found the solution here and tweaked it slightly - https://css-tricks.com/snippets/php/intelligent-php-cache-control/
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