How do I completely disable caching in Cakephp?

James Lamiell picture James Lamiell · Apr 19, 2010 · Viewed 19.5k times · Source

So I opened the cache floodgates in my Cakephp app and now I want to close them...

I've done pretty much everything I can: delete all files in the tmp folder (but not the folders), turned 'Cache.disable' on in the core.php file in my app, have tried clearing the cache from within some controllers with clearCache() and Cache::clear() (but I suspect this doesn't work because it's not loading the controller -- due to caching).

I've pretty much effectively halted my development process just because caching won't turn off. Anyone have some ideas that I could try? I'm starting to think it may be within the browser or maybe my hosting service, but it's probably just Cakephp messing with me.

Answer

Daniel Wright picture Daniel Wright · Apr 19, 2010

To rule out browser caching as the root cause, you might try adding the following lines:

header('Cache-Control: no-store, private, no-cache, must-revalidate');                  // HTTP/1.1
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0, max-stale = 0', false);    // HTTP/1.1
header('Pragma: public');
header('Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');                                       // Date in the past  
header('Expires: 0', false); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT');
header('Pragma: no-cache');

The combination of all these cache-busting HTTP headers has, in my experience, worked in all browsers, and has got around some very aggressive caching proxies as well.