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We are trying to set Cache-Control header: max-age=300, public to all our public site pages. To use Filesmatch, my applciation pages do not have any extensions. ExpiresByType is available, but it has its own disadvantages.

I am looking for a way to set cache control header to all my application pages with content type as text/html. Is there any way to achieve this?

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3 Answers 3

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A safer way (because developers can make misstakes when setting Content-Type for file extensions) is to set header based on the actual Content-Type:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  Header set Cache-Control "max-age=300, public" "expr=%{CONTENT_TYPE} =~ m#text/html#i"
</IfModule>
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The browser doesn't need to see a .html extension for it to know it is a text/html mime type document. As long as the header broadcasts to the client browser that the document is indeed of mime type text/html, this will do just fine:

ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 300 seconds"

If you elaborate on the "has its own disadvantages" part, we can perhaps comment on that too.

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  • I do not have mod_expires.so module in our apache config. It's been refined and only option I have is to control by setting max-age in cache-control header. Is there any way that I can do this?
    – skonka
    Jun 18, 2015 at 11:24
  • You don't mention the technology behind your application, but for example in PHP you can set the cache control headers directly in the code: stackoverflow.com/questions/4480304/… eg. header("Cache-Control: max-age=300");
    – JayMcTee
    Jun 18, 2015 at 12:01
  • Our pages are all HTML, rendered from a content management system. We have apache to maintain our static content, rewrite rules, reverse proxy etc.,
    – skonka
    Jun 18, 2015 at 14:30
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As you can't use mod_expires, maybe you can use mod_headers instead : http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_headers.html.

You can use filesMatch combined with header

<filesMatch "\\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=300, public"
</filesMatch>
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  • I have been using FilesMatch, but an interesting thing to note is that unless your html pages have ".html" (or ".htm") extension, this branch won't be invoked. It's better to use a Content-Type of text/html to do the matching
    – Dagmar
    May 18, 2020 at 11:45
  • Yes, this way you apply the rule only on .htm and .html files, this can prevent dynamic pages (like php) to be cached if they send html headers
    – Froggiz
    May 19, 2020 at 12:12

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