Nashville Rails Meetup Presentation - "Rails Page Caching"

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Here is the presentation I gave at the February 2010 Nashville Ruby on Rails Meetup.

Tagged: rails, ruby on rails, caching

Rails Subdomain Caching

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A while ago, I was working on a site that had dynamic subdomains based on cities in the database. For example, if an admin created a record for Nashville, it would create http://nashville.sitename.com. The site was pretty content heavy, but didn't change a whole lot, so I wanted to cache as much as I could. The problem with caching was that the content of each page depended on the subdomain. I couldn't use the normal caching strategy because of this.

To handle the subdomain routing and identification, I used the awesome subdomain-fu plugin (which worked great). Subdomain-fu, if I remember correctly, is really smart about placing the cached files in a folder, named for the subdomain, within your cache location (in my case '/public/cache/'). This is great, but how the hell do we retrieve the cached files? I had a little bit of trouble with this, mainly because I'm not a mod_rewrite specialist. After some tinkering and testing, I finally came up with the following rules to put in my conf file to properly retrieve the cached files based on the subdomain.

# Check for subdomain cached index
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.sitename\.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]+)\.sitename\.com
RewriteRule ^/$ /cache/%1/index.html [QSA]

# Check for subdomain cached page
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.sitename\.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]+)\.sitename\.com
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ /cache/%1/$1.html [QSA]

# Check for regular non-subdomain index
RewriteRule ^/$ /cache/index.html [QSA] 

# Check for regular non-subdomain page
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ /cache/$1.html [QSA]

Those first two entries check to make sure the subdomain isn't www, then checks the cache folder for a cached version of the page. The last two entries check for the regular www subdomain.

These entries worked great for my project, but, like I said, I'm no expert with mod_rewrite. If you see anything that can be simplified or a better way of doing something, please let me know in the comments.

Tagged: tutorial, caching, rails