Fighting client-side caching in Django

Question

I'm using the render_to_response shortcut and don't want to craft a specific Response object to add additional headers to prevent client-side caching.

I'd like to have a response that contains:

• Pragma: no-cache
• Cache-control : no-cache
• Cache-control: must-revalidate

And all the other nifty ways that browsers will hopefully interpret as directives to avoid caching.

Is there a no-cache middleware or something similar that can do the trick with minimal code intrusion?

Answer 1

You can achieve this using the cache_control decorator. Example from the documentation:

from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache  @never_cache def myview(request):    # ... 

Answer 2

This approach (slight modification of L. De Leo's solution) with a custom middleware has worked well for me as a site wide solution:

from django.utils.cache import add_never_cache_headers  class DisableClientSideCachingMiddleware(object):     def process_response(self, request, response):         add_never_cache_headers(response)         return response 

This makes use of add_never_cache_headers.

---

If you want to combine this with UpdateCacheMiddleware and FetchFromCacheMiddleware, to enable server-side caching while disabling client-side caching, you need to add DisableClientSideCachingMiddleware before everything else, like this:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (     'custom.middleware.DisableClientSideCachingMiddleware',     'django.middleware.cache.UpdateCacheMiddleware',     # ... all other middleware ...     'django.middleware.cache.FetchFromCacheMiddleware', )