mod_rewrite, RequestCond, File Age

[joebert]

September 27th, 2009, 1:29 pm

In a nutshell, I have a cache system setup where mod_rewrite looks in a cache folder to see if the REQUEST_URI can be found there before rewriting the address and generating a page.

I'm looking for something, I'm guessing a RequestCond line, that would work with the age of the files in that cache directory too, not just whether it exists or not. Something along the lines of if REQUEST_URI is found in the /cache directory, and is less than 4 hours old, rewrite to that address, otherwise assume it doesn't exist and it will be overwritten by regeneration.

[joebert]

September 27th, 2009, 4:41 pm

Looks like the answer is no.

I've scoured the web and Apaches manuals, it doesn't look good. closest thing I can find related to working with files, is the -f flag that tells you if it's an actual file, and the path of the file.

Guess I'll just continue to have cron jobs clean up the cache.

October 22nd, 2009, 8:38 am

Don't know if any kindof fix is still valid, but I found this post while looking for the same thing, and essentially looks like the basic answer is mod_rewrite doesn't have the ability to look at file mod times.

However I did find a *kindof* workaround to this using an external bash script as documented in the address below (had to break it up to get past the spam checker system).

There is one problem - it seems you can't use rewritemap in .htaccess so this would only work on a dedicated server where you had access to the httpd.conf file. Looks like it can run in the virtual hosts bit, but is a bit of a pain.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1318 ... d-htaccess

Not tried the script, but I guess that or a PHP script could do the job. Right pain and stupid thing to leave out of .htaccess IMO.

Trev

Moderator Remark: Linkified URL

[joebert]

October 22nd, 2009, 9:26 am

I've decided, for my situation, that it would be less work to have a cron job clean up the cache on a schedule than it would be to have each individual request do a lookup itself.

Nice link though.

October 22nd, 2009, 10:13 am

Came to essentially the same conclusion myself, although using a backup of the cache too (incase of server problems). Pity that doesn't work as it should be pretty efficient since the rewritemap called script gets held in memory.

Trev