How to add browser cache in Laravel 5?

Question

I wish to add browser caching to my Laravel application.

I have used Elixir versioning tool like so: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/elixir#versioning-and-cache-busting

However, according to Google PageSpeed Insights, the files is still not caching and I instead got this message:

Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network.

I think this may be because I need to manually add cache headers?

Answer 1

Yes you need to set Cache-Control and Expires in HTTP header for static resources, so that this Google PageSpeed message will not show up.

Since you're already using Elixir versioning tool, you can safely set Expires of JS/CSS files to 1 week.

The way to do it depends on what web server you are using.

If you are using Apache, you may put the following code in .htaccess or the config file of your virtual website.

<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 weeks"
</FilesMatch>

Be sure to enable the mod_expires Apache module!

With the same syntax, you can set up cache rules for .html, .jpg, .png files and so on, to speed up page loading.

If you are using nginx, there are similar ways to solve this problem, you may follow this tutorial