what is the best way to bypass Akamai cache?

caching akamai
Ian H picture Ian H · Feb 9, 2016 · Viewed 10.1k times · Source

I'm trying to run some acceptance tests against a site that lives behind an akamai CND. To ensure the site is deployed / is running correctly I'd like to bypass akamai.

I've tried the following command to test headers:

curl -H "Pragma: akamai-x-cache-on, akamai-x-cache-remote-on, akamai-x-check-cacheable, akamai-x-get-cache-key, akamai-x-get-extracted-values, akamai-x-get-nonces, akamai-x-get-ssl-client-session-id, akamai-x-get-true-cache-key, akamai-x-serial-no" -IXGET http://www.blah.com/blah.css/

This gives loads of cache information, but does not bypass the cache entirely. For example, if a file is missing but available in the cache it will 200 if it hit's an akamai node with that file.

Does anyone have any experience of this that can help?

Answer

Daniel Baker picture Daniel Baker · Feb 12, 2016

The best way to do this is find out what the Origin domain is Akamai accesses for content to cache and base your tests against those origin domains.

Here's a good link that lightly describes how Akamai works:

https://developer.akamai.com/stuff/Overview/Client_Edge_Servers_Origin.html

It might also be important to note that you could flush the cache and test proper caching of live files as testing only the back-end puts complete faith in Akamai not to fail.

I would test both the Origin servers, as well as the cached content for proper operation and consistency.

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