Earlier this week, I released version 1.0 of the caching proxy library FOSHttpCache and the Symfony2 FOSHttpCacheBundle. The library implements talking to caching proxies to invalidate cache, the bundle integrates the library into Symfony2 and adds other caching related features to Symfony2.

The library is all about talking to caching proxies to do active cache invalidation. It also provides the foundations for the User Context caching scheme that allows to share caches that do not depend on individual credentials but common roles or permissions of users.

The Symfony2 bundle FOSHttpCacheBundle integrates those features into Symfony2, using the configuration, providing annotations for invalidation, invalidating by Symfony2 routes and a default user context implementation based on the user roles. On top of this, the bundle allows to configure caching headers on request patterns, similar to the Symfony2 security component, and adds support for cache tagging.

Both library and bundle are well documented and thoroughly tested. The testing setup includes integration tests running a Varnish or Nginx instance. The test cases can also be reused for functional testing in your applications.

The cache header rules concept has been ported over from the LiipCacheControlBundle which is now deprecated. A migration guide is provided to update your projects.

Development of this started when I met David de Boer from driebit at last years SymfonyCon in Warsaw. He presented DriebitHttpCacheBundle which started from the cache invalidation, while the LiipCacheControlBundle started at caching headers. But both bundles had started to overlap already. We decided to build one common codebase that does both tasks. After more than half a year of writing better tests, refactoring and properly documenting, the code is now in a very good state. Besides David, a shoutout has to go to Joel Wurtz for contributing the user context implementation, Simone Fumagalli for the Nginx integration, Christophe Coevoet (stof) for his valuable feedback and reviews, and all the other contributors of the library and the bundle (some of those coming from the LiipCacheControlBundle git history).