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đź”— Feature: Surrogate Protocol

đź”— Details

The question regularly arises how to override the Cache-Control header for a local proxy acting as a reverse-proxy gateway without impacting the control on external regular proxies.

Surrogate protocol extensions to HTTP permit proxies acting as content delivery gateways (reverse proxies, or accelerator proxies) to be assigned specific controls different to both user browsers and intermediary proxies.

:information_source: Support is added alongside ESI protocol to Squid-3.0, where it can be used when the ESI feature is enabled.

:information_source: Squid-3.2 breaks it out for general use by non-ESI reverse proxies.

đź”— Configuration

đź”— Squid

Simple setup for Squid-3.2 and later:

http_port 80 accel
visible_hostname cdn.example.com

đź”— Testing

You can use your favourite tools or scripts to display the headers received by the web server to test this. What you will see with the above config should be something like this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Surrogate-Capability: cdn.example.com="Surrogate/1.0"
...

or maybe

GET / HTTP/1.1
Surrogate-Capability: proxy123.example.com="Surrogate/1.0"
...

:information_source: The text which is quoted may contain other protocol names like this: “Surrogate/1.0 ESI/1.0”

đź”— Web Server

The web server or application must be capable of receiving the Surrogate-Capability headers and identifying whether the ID is acceptible.

:x: Special care may be needed. The ID tags “unset-id” , “unconfigured” and “localhost”, “localhost.localdomain” are known to possibly be sent by many broken or mis-configured proxies.

The web server or application then adds a Surrogate-Control header in its HTTP replies containing the instructions which are to be used instead of the Cache-Control header settings.

Details about Surrogate-Control can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/edge-arch

đź”— Usage Examples

squid:

visible_hostname cdn.example.com

Web server headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, max-age=900, s-max-age=3600
Surrogate-Control: max-age=86400;cdn.example.com
...

What this does is:

Categories: Feature

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