Tagging

Works with:

• Varnish

If your application has many intricate relationships between cached items, which makes it complex to invalidate them by route, cache tagging will be useful. It helps you with invalidating many-to-many relationships between content items.

Cache tagging, or more precisely Tagged Cache Invalidation, a simpler version of Linked Cache Invalidation (LCI), allows you to:

• assign tags to your applications’s responses (e.g., articles, article-42)
• invalidate the responses by tag (e.g., invalidate all responses that are tagged article-42)

Basic Configuration

First configure your proxy for tagging. Then enable tagging in your application configuration:

fos_http_cache:
    tags:
        enabled: true

For more information, see tags.

Setting and Invalidating Tags

You can tag responses in different ways: with the tag handler from PHP or with a twig function, from configuration or using annotations on controller actions.

Tagging from Code

Inject the TagHandler (service fos_http_cache.handler.tag_handler) and use addTags($tags) to add tags that will be set on the response:

use FOS\HttpCacheBundle\Handler\TagHandler;

class NewsController
{
    /**
     * @var TagHandler
     */
    private $tagHandler;

    public function articleAction($id)
    {
        $this->tagHandler->addTags(array('news', 'news-' . $id));

        // ...
    }
}

To invalidate tags, call TagHandler::invalidateTags($tags):

class NewsController
{
    // ...

    public function editAction($id)
    {
        // ...

        $this->tagHandler->invalidateTags(array('news-' . $id));

        // ...
    }
}

See the Tag Handler reference for full details.

Tagging from Twig Templates

In situations where a page is assembled in the templating layer, it can be more convenient to add tags from inside the template. This works the same way as with the tag handler and can also be mixed with the other methods:

{# template.html.twig #}
{{ fos_httpcache_tag('mytag') }}
{{ fos_httpcache_tag(['tag-one', 'tag-two']) }}

Hint

This twig function never outputs anything into the template but is only called for the side effect of adding the tag to the response header.

Note

Tag invalidation from twig would be a strange architecture and is therefore not supported.

Tagging with Configuration Rules

Alternatively, you can configure rules for setting and invalidating tags:

// app/config/config.yml
fos_http_cache:
    tags:
        rules:
            -
                match:
                    path: ^/news/article
                tags: [news]

Now if a safe request matches the criteria under match, the response will be tagged with news. When an unsafe request matches, the tag news will be invalidated.

Tagging with Controller Annotations

Add the @Tag annotations to your controllers to set and invalidate tags:

use FOS\HttpCacheBundle\Configuration\Tag;

class NewsController
{
    /**
     * @Tag("news", expression="'news-'~id")
     */
    public function articleAction($id)
    {
        // Assume $id equals 123
    }
}

If articleAction handles a safe request, a tag news-123 is set on the response. If a client tries to update or delete news article 123 with an unsafe request to articleAction, such as POST or DELETE, tag news-123 is invalidated.

See the @Tag reference for full details.