Using nginx to serve content directly out of a redis cache

Question

I am using nginx to pass requests to a Node app. The app basically acts as a remote cache for html (checks to see if what the user is requesting is in the redis db, if it is just show that, if not grab it and store it in the redis cache and serve it up.)

I was curious if there was anyway to bypass hitting the Node app by having nginx serve up the content directly from redis? I have been fooling around with the http_redis module but I can't really get it to work.

A simple example would be: http://mywebsite.com/a where nginx would serve the content up in the 'a' key or pass it on to the node app if the key did not exist. Is this even possible?

Answer 1

Maybe something more difficult to setup than Webdis but you can do that directly in the nginx daemon with some extra modules like redis2-nginx-module. You will have to recompile nginx.

There is some good examples of configuration on the home page.

For instance :

# GET /get?key=some_key
location /get {
    set_unescape_uri $key $arg_key;  # this requires ngx_set_misc
    redis2_query get $key;
    redis2_pass foo.com:6379;
}

Of course, with a little more nginx configuration, you can get another URL pattern.

Note that for this example, you will have to compile ngx_set_misc module too.