How do I completely disable caching in Cakephp?

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

You could look your controller code for some element caching and set them to false. This applies to app_controller.php or Controller/AppController.php depending on version of Cake you use.

Controller::cacheAction = false

echo $this->element('latest_comments', array(), array('cache' => false));

You could try adding Controller::disableCache(); in your controller action.

Answer 3

Kind of a long shot (plus this thread is old, but oh well), but I had a similar problem: I couldn't get IE to quit caching ajax requests (using jQuery). After much heartache and headache a simple:

$.ajaxSetup({cache:false});

did the trick. Gotta love IE...

Answer 4

I had a problem once with the model getting cached and no longer reflected the schema of the table.

I had to update my /config/core.php and set "debug:2" This disables the caching of my models and fixed my problems.