Caching won't work

[eric.lucien.goldstei]

Hi all,
I’ve been spending the last two days diving heavily into Cloudflare and have been struggling with getting static resources to cache. No matter what I do, I’ve never seen a CF-Cache-Status header.

I’m using Cloudflare Workers to host a super-simple website (still learning this platform). I’ve tried using Page Rules to turn Origin Cache Control on or off, and I’ve tried every combination of max-age and/or s-maxage headers imaginable but I’ve gotten nowhere.

Here’s some example output using curl:

[email protected] homepage-worker $ curl -I https://www.ericgoldstein.org/assets/images/mango-man.png
HTTP/2 200
date: Sun, 20 Feb 2022 07:07:15 GMT
content-type: image/png
content-length: 4525
cache-control: max-age=5, s-maxage=31536000, stale-if-error=86400, no-transform
expect-ct: max-age=604800, report-uri="https://report-uri.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/beacon/expect-ct"
report-to: {"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\/\/a.nel.cloudflare.com\/report\/v3?s=H%2FBvaPRQqHFi%2Fk0IWJrnI5CzjTukSlri07ROSau7UKt%2BpM7mw4oWjMLzGuoKBcX5fBDU%2BGRfJgtpmPBZWuKXV4RWOvCIcif2NEGArsqQcuNBo6%2BNLoRFqBOdkjDKj0cHMC2jwFEQMXA%3D"}],"group":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
nel: {"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
server: cloudflare
cf-ray: 6e05e59d4b858c09-EWR
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400, h3-29=":443"; ma=86400

You can see my worker code here: homepage-worker/worker.mjs at master · mangs/homepage-worker · GitHub

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

[erictung]

Websites directly served from Workers do not have cf-cache-status header. Caching will not be involved if you serve your websites from Workers - even if you can cache, each incoming request (no matter cached or uncached) will still count as one Workers request.

[eric.lucien.goldstei]

Um, that’s really misleading considering all the documentation related to caching in the Workers documentation. Also, this was written by Cloudflare and it supposedly caches static content in the CDN despite serving out of a worker: @cloudflare/kv-asset-handler - npm

Can you clarify further? If this is all true, I feel like I wasted 2 days worth of time.

[erictung]

Kindly read this, could be related:

Cache in front of Worker

Currently, no matter what, a Cloudflare Worker will run in front of CF’s cache. This makes Workers unappealing for doing things like serving static content (obtained via a complicated scheme only Workers can do) since you will be billed for every request; in this situation, it makes much more sense to build on another Serverless platform like Lambda or Cloud Functions since then you could have it serve the static content and get CF to cache the responses, all at a fraction of the price of what i…

Cache in front of Worker

So, I think this thread is conflating technical architecture with pricing… A Worker can use the Cache API to implement arbitrary caching logic. A Worker that makes good use of the Cache API should be able to achieve the same performance as if the cache ran in front of the Worker. Hence, there is not a technical reason for Workers to run behind cache. But it sounds like the motivation here is to avoid being billed for requests that hit cache. This assumes that if cache ran in front of Workers, …

[eric.lucien.goldstei]

OMG I FIGURED IT OUT. I found this article in your documentation and this got me the rest of the way there: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configure-your-cdn

I would strongly recommend mentioning that article in early onboarding documentation to save folks from having to go through all the digging I did. Your documentation is good when you can find what you’re looking for, but the contradictory nature of one article vs the next can feel very frustrating at times. Hope this helps save someone else some time.

[eric.lucien.goldstei]

Thank you for trying to help, I appreciate the quick responses!