handling_requests.md

Handling Requests

The idea behind the module is to avoid passing requests through to SilverStripe where possible. To that end, we want to attempt to serve the request from the static files if we can.

Using index.php

The simplest way to do this is to add the following code block to your index.php:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

/** --- goes in here ---- */
$requestHandler = require 'staticrequesthandler.php';

// successful cache hit
if (false !== $requestHandler('cache')) {
    die;
} else {
    // do something here if you want, for example add a cache-miss header
    header('X-Cache-Miss: ' . date(\Datetime::COOKIE));
}

To walk through this a bit:

$requestHandler = require 'staticrequesthandler.php';

This includes the function from the static request handler that we are using to search for the appropriate cache file. Out of the box, this will look for a .php file, then a .html file, that matches the URL.

if (false !== $requestHandler('cache')) {
    die;
}

The argument passed through here is the cache directory - by default this is cache, but can be configured via yaml. The function returns false if it doesn't find a cache file. So this means that we only pass through to SilverStripe for processing if we don't hit a cache file.

This also takes a second argument, $urlMapping, which should be a callable that processes the URL into a path.

You can see an example index.php here

Using .htaccess

Alternatively, you can intercept the requests before they hit PHP at all. This is especially useful if you are only generating .html files and don't need the extra overhead. To do this, you'd add a rewrite rule to your .htaccess file like so:

# Cached content - sub-pages (site in the root of a domain)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET|HEAD$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.*[^/])/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/cache/%1.html -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .* /cache/%1.html [L]

That routes all requests to the .html equivalent if it exists. You can see an example here that includes some more advanced configuration options.

Using Nginx

There are a couple of example configurations in the examples dir of Nginx templates, but you'll need to ensure they are optimized for the security of your system.