Caching responses in Lithium

If you need to cache full Response objects in Lithium (which means that your controllers don’t even get called when there’s a cache hit), you can place this in your app/config/bootstrap/cache.php file (note that this is certainly not “production ready”, but it should give you a starting point):

/**
 * Cache full Responses
 */
Dispatcher::applyFilter('run', function($self, $params, $chain) {
    $key = md5(LITHIUM_APP_PATH) . '.app.cache.'.md5($params['request']->url);
    if($cache = Cache::read('default', $key)) {
        return $cache;
    }

    $result = $chain->next($self, $params, $chain);

    Cache::write('default', $key, $result, '+1 day');
    return $result;
});

It filters the Dispatcher and first checks if the Response object is already stored in the cache. The cache key is based on the requested URL, so if your / URL points to ``/posts/index, both requests will be cached seperately (you could modify the code snipped so that it talks to the Router` and checks for the corresponding controller/action object and cache on this key).

Your filter chain returns the Response object, so we can directly cache it. The serialization strategy takes care of correctly storing and retrieving our cached object.

If you have alternative approaches to tackle this, please let me know!