The CacheEnable directive instructs mod_cache to cache urls at or below url-string. The cache storage manager is specified with the cache_type argument. cache_type mem instructs mod_cache to use the memory based storage manager implemented by mod_mem_cache. cache_type disk instructs mod_cache to use the disk based storage manager implemented by mod_disk_cache. cache_type fd instructs mod_cache to use the file descriptor cache implemented by mod_mem_cache.

In the event that the URL space overlaps between different CacheEnable directives (as in the example below), each possible storage manager will be run until the first one that actually processes the request. The order in which the storage managers are run is determined by the order of the CacheEnable directives in the configuration file.

The CacheDisable directive instructs mod_cache to not cache urls at or below url-string.

The CacheMaxExpire directive specifies the maximum number of seconds for which cachable HTTP documents will be retained without checking the origin server. Thus, documents will be out of date at most this number of seconds. This maximum value is enforced even if an expiry date was supplied with the document.

The CacheDefaultExpire directive specifies a default time, in seconds, to cache a document if neither an expiry date nor last-modified date are provided with the document. The value specified with the CacheMaxExpire directive does not override this setting.

Ordinarily, documents without a last-modified date are not cached. Under some circumstances the last-modified date is removed (during mod_include processing for example) or not provided at all. The CacheIgnoreNoLastMod directive provides a way to specify that documents without last-modified dates should be considered for caching, even without a last-modified date. If neither a last-modified date nor an expiry date are provided with the document then the value specified by the CacheDefaultExpire directive will be used to generate an expiration date.

Ordinarily, documents with no-cache or no-store header values will not be stored in the cache. The CacheIgnoreCacheControl directive allows this behavior to be overridden. CacheIgnoreCacheControl On tells the server to attempt to cache the document even if it contains no-cache or no-store header values. Documents requiring authorization will never be cached.

In the event that a document does not provide an expiry date but does provide a last-modified date, an expiry date can be calculated based on the time since the document was last modified. The CacheLastModifiedFactor directive specifies a factor to be used in the generation of this expiry date according to the following formula: expiry-period = time-since-last-modified-date * factor expiry-date = current-date + expiry-period For example, if the document was last modified 10 hours ago, and factor is 0.1 then the expiry-period will be set to 10*0.1 = 1 hour. If the current time was 3:00pm then the computed expiry-date would be 3:00pm + 1hour = 4:00pm. If the expiry-period would be longer than that set by CacheMaxExpire, then the latter takes precedence.

According to RFC 2616, hop-by-hop HTTP headers are not stored in the cache. The following HTTP headers are hop-by-hop headers and thus do not get stored in the cache in any case regardless of the setting of CacheIgnoreHeaders:

• Connection
• Keep-Alive
• Proxy-Authenticate
• Proxy-Authorization
• TE
• Trailers
• Transfer-Encoding
• Upgrade

CacheIgnoreHeaders specifies additional HTTP headers that should not to be stored in the cache. For example, it makes sense in some cases to prevent cookies from being stored in the cache.

CacheIgnoreHeaders takes a space separated list of HTTP headers that should not be stored in the cache. If only hop-by-hop headers not should be stored in the cache (the RFC 2616 compliant behaviour), CacheIgnoreHeaders can be set to None.