HTTP::Cache::Transparent - Cache the result of http get-requests persistently.
use LWP::Simple;
use HTTP::Cache::Transparent;
HTTP::Cache::Transparent::init( {
BasePath => '/tmp/cache',
} );
my $data = get( 'http://www.sn.no' );
An implementation of http get that keeps a local cache of fetched pages to avoid
fetching the same data from the server if it hasn't been updated. The cache is
stored on disk and is thus persistent between invocations.
Uses the http-headers If-Modified-Since and ETag to let the server
decide if the version in the cache is up-to-date or not.
The cache is implemented by modifying the LWP::UserAgent class to
seamlessly cache the result of all requests that can be cached.
HTTP::Cache::Transparent provides an init-method that sets the parameters for
the cache and overloads a method in LWP::UserAgent to activate the cache.After
init has been called, the normal LWP-methods (LWP::Simple as well as the more
full-fledged LWP::Request methods) should be used as usual.
- init
- Initialize the HTTP cache. Takes a single parameter which is a hashref
containing named arguments to the object.
HTTP::Cache::Transparent::init( {
# Directory to store the cache in.
BasePath => "/tmp/cache",
# How many hours should items be kept in the cache
# after they were last requested?
# Default is 8*24.
MaxAge => 8*24,
# Print progress-messages to STDERR.
# Default is 0.
Verbose => 1,
# If a request is made for a url that has been requested
# from the server less than NoUpdate seconds ago, the
# response will be generated from the cache without
# contacting the server.
# Default is 0.
NoUpdate => 15*60,
# When a url has been downloaded and the response indicates that
# has been modified compared to the content in the cache,
# the ApproveContent callback is called with the HTTP::Response.
# The callback shall return true if the response shall be used and
# stored in the cache or false if the response shall be discarded
# and the response in the cache used instead.
# This mechanism can be used to work around servers that return errors
# intermittently. The default is to accept all responses.
ApproveContent => sub { return $_[0]->is_success },
} );
The directory where the cache is stored must be writable. It
must also only contain files created by HTTP::Cache::Transparent.
- Initializing from use-line
- An alternative way of initializing HTTP::Cache::Transparent is to supply
parameters in the use-line. This allows you to write
use HTTP::Cache::Transparent ( BasePath => '/tmp/cache' );
which is exactly equivalent to
use HTTP::Cache::Transparent;
HTTP::Cache::Transparent::init( BasePath => '/tmp/cache' );
The advantage to using this method is that you can do
perl -MHTTP::Cache::Transparent=BasePath,/tmp/cache myscript.pl
or even set the environment variable PERL5OPT
PERL5OPT=-MHTTP::Cache::Transparent=BasePath,/tmp/cache
myscript.pl
and have all the http-requests performed by myscript.pl go
through the cache without changing myscript.pl
The HTTP::Cache::Transparent inserts three special headers in the HTTP::Response
object. These can be accessed via the HTTP::Response::header()-method.
- X-Cached
- This header is inserted and set to 1 if the response is delivered from the
cache instead of from the server.
- X-Content-Unchanged
- This header is inserted and set to 1 if the content returned is the same
as the content returned the last time this url was fetched. This header is
always inserted and set to 1 when the response is delivered from the
cache.
- X-No-Server-Contact
- This header is inserted and set to 1 if the content returned has been
delivered without any contact with the external server, i.e. no
conditional or unconditional HTTP GET request has been sent, the content
has been delivered directly from cache. This may be useful when seeking to
control loading of the external server.
This module has a number of limitations that you should be aware of before using
it.
- There is no upper limit to how much diskspace the cache requires. The only
limiting mechanism is that data for urls that haven't been requested in
the last MaxAge hours will be removed from the cache the next time the
program exits.
- Currently, only get-requests that store the result in memory (i.e. do not
use the option to have the result stored directly in a file or delivered
via a callback) is cached. I intend to remove this limitation in a future
version.
- The support for Ranges is a bit primitive. It creates a new object in the
cache for each unique combination of url and range. This will work ok as
long as you always request the same range(s) for a url.
- The cache doesn't properly check and store all headers in the HTTP request
and response. Therefore, if you request the same url repeatedly with
different sets of headers (cookies, accept-encoding etc), and these
headers affect the response from the server, the cache may return the
wrong response.
- HTTP::Cache::Transparent has not been tested with threads, and will most
likely not work if you use them.
The cache is stored on disk as one file per cached object. The filename is equal
to the md5sum of the url and the Range-header if it exists. The file contains
a set of key/value-pairs with metadata (one entry per line) followed by a
blank line and then the actual data returned by the server.
The last modified date of the cache file is set to the time when
the cache object was last requested by a user.
Mattias Holmlund, <$firstname -at- $lastname -dot-
se> <http://www.holmlund.se/mattias/>
A git repository containing the source for this module can be found via
http://git.holmlund.se/
Copyright (C) 2004-2007 by Mattias Holmlund
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.