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Varnish, Drual and ical (.ics): expiry issue fixed

My normal configuration of a public site on my servers involves using varnish for the page cache and setting expire page to 1 day. This mostly works quite well (the varnish module in Drupal takes care of clearing the varnish cache when you're creating/editing content).

We recently launched a new Drupal version of the Calgary French & International School (okay, I was just along for the tail end to help with the launch, Karin and Rob get the credit for all the work), which includes an ical feed for parents (generated from views of course).

That's an excellent thing - parents can subscribe to the feed and have all the upcoming events on their mobile device (or google calendar, or both). But we discovered that although it works great on the Mac desktop, it wasn't working well for iOS (i.e. the iPhone). It would poll frequently enough, but only actually update once a day.

It turned out that these two devices are interpreting the http header 'cache-control' differently - on the iphone, it appeared to interpret it to say don't both looking for fresh data more than once a day. The header is not very well defined unfortunately, but it is used by Drupal/Varnish to control the maximum expiry date, so we didn't want to crank it too low (or risk a badly performing site, since most access is anonymous).

The solution was actually simple: a little help in the varnish vcl file, in my vcl_deliver function, below. The piece I added was the second if, and it's just modifying the cache-control header on output if it's delivering a file with extension 'ics'.

sub vcl_deliver {
  if (resp.http.magicmarker) {
    unset resp.http.magicmarker;
    set resp.http.age = "0";
  }
  if (req.url ~ "\.ics$") {
    set resp.http.cache-control = "public, max-age=60";
  }
}



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