Cache management

How lazysite caches pages and how to control regeneration.

Cache management

lazysite caches rendered pages as .html files alongside their .md sources. The cache is transparent - Apache's DirectoryIndex serves the .html file directly without invoking the processor.

When cache is served

A cached .html file is served when:

• The .html file exists and its mtime is newer than the .md source
• OR the page has a ttl: in front matter and the cache age is within the TTL (even if the .md file is newer)

Cache is skipped when:

• LAZYSITE_NOCACHE is set
• The request has active query parameters (declared in query_params:)

When cache is written

After processing a page, the rendered HTML is written to the corresponding .html path. Cache writes are skipped when:

• LAZYSITE_NOCACHE is set
• The page has active query parameters
• The rendered content is zero bytes (safety guard)
• The output path resolves outside the docroot (symlink protection)

Forcing regeneration

Delete the cached .html file:

rm public_html/my-page.html

The next request to /my-page regenerates and caches it.

Clear all cached pages:

find public_html -name "*.html" ! -path "*/lazysite/*" -delete

Page TTL

Set ttl: in front matter to keep serving the cache even when the .md source is newer:

---
ttl: 300
---

The TTL is in seconds. This is useful for pages with url: or scan: variables that should not regenerate on every source file touch.

Browser caching

When a page has ttl: set, the processor sends a Cache-Control: public, max-age=TTL HTTP header. This tells the browser to cache the response for that duration without revalidating.

Pages without ttl: do not send a Cache-Control header - browser behaviour depends on its defaults.

When LAZYSITE_NOCACHE is set, the Cache-Control header is still sent if the page has ttl: - NOCACHE only affects the server-side .html cache, not browser cache headers.

Notes

• The .html file must have the same name as the .md file (e.g., about.md caches to about.html)
• Zero-byte .html files are never written - this prevents empty cache files from blocking regeneration via DirectoryIndex
• New directories created for cache files inherit the docroot's group ownership with the setgid bit set
• LAZYSITE_NOCACHE - bypass caching entirely
• Content type cache - separate cache for content type headers