connect-file-cache

A static cache middleware for Connect spun off from connect-assets. Written in CoffeeScript by the author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development.

Why connect-file-cache?

If you're just serving files, Connect's own static (possibly with staticCache on top) is quite sufficient. But suppose you want to serve, say, compiled and minified CoffeeScript with a far-future expires header, and you want multiple routes to be able to point at that same file (say, one with an MD5 suffix for disambiguation, and one without).

That's the use case connect-file-cache was born out of. It's designed to be very fast. The "files" it serves don't have to exist on disk at all. On the other hand, it's not suitable for serving large files (or many), because all files are stored in memory.

Bonus: connect-file-cache also does gzip (when requested)!

How do I use it?

Install:

npm install connect-file-cache

Then in your app:

connectCache = require 'connect-file-cache'
cache = connectCache options
app.use cache.middleware

where options is a hash that may include

src: A dir containing files to be served directly (defaults to null)
routePrefix: Data will be served from this path (defaults to /)

You can map routes directly to strings like so:

cache.set 'foo/bar.txt', 'str'

Then go to yourapp/foo/bar.txt in your browser.

Additional Features

You can map multiple routes by passing in an array as the first argument:

cache.set ['foo/bar.txt', 'foo/baz.txt'], 'str'

And if you want the browser to download the file rather than trying to display it, set the attachment flag to true:

cache.set 'foo/bar.txt', 'str', attachment: true

By default, MIME types are automatically inferred from file extensions. But you can override this with the mime option:

cache.set 'foo/bar.txt', 'str', mime: 'html'

To support browser-side caching, connect-file-cache handles "If-Modified-Since" requests. But to prevent even those few milliseconds of extra latency, you can set expires to false—meaning that the browser will never download the file again (from the same route):

cache.set 'foo/bar.txt', 'str', expires: false

For more advanced examples, check the test folder.

Credits

Thoroughly inspired by Connect's static middleware.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.