This module provides an API for your project to be able to generate a static HTML cache of your pages to enhance security (by blocking off the interactive backend requests via your server configuration) and performance (by serving just HTML).

It provides a queue implementation that:

• allows to rebuild files selectively
• avoids the issues of rebuilding potentially hundreds of related pages synchronously once a page is saved in the CMS. As the queue is worked off outside of any visitor views or CMS author actions, it allows for a more fine grained control over the queue, prioritization of URLs, detection of queue duplicates, etc.

The module is optimized for high responsiveness in scenarios where a single edit might trigger hundreds of page rebuilds, through batching the queue population as well as allowing to run the queue processing task as a continuous background task (similar to a Unix daemon).

• SilverStripe 3.1

By default the module is not applying any of its decorators, and will not affect the behaviour of your application. You need to configure the module and the webserver before use - this section will walk you through the configuration activities that you need to perform.

Module comes with some basic implementations to use out of the box (see "Reference" section below for information about provided interfaces). You can apply these implementations using the config system to make all your Pages publishable:

---
Name: mysiteconfig_redirector
After: 'staticpublishqueue/*'
---
RedirectorPage:
  extensions:
    - PublishableRedirectorPage
---
Name: mysiteconfig_staticpublishqueue
After: 'staticpublishqueue/*','#mysiteconfig_redirector'
---
SiteTree:
  extensions:
    - PublishableSiteTree
    - SiteTreePublishingEngine
    - FilesystemPublisher('cache', 'html')

The order is significant - PublishableRedirectorPage needs to be applied before the mysiteconfig_staticpublishqueue, because it needs to override the default PublishableSiteTree (hence the use of the "After" directives of the config system).

The static base directory is the base directory that the Static Publishing will use as a basis for all static assets refernces (js, css, etc.) using the HTML "base" tag. This needs to be configured in the following two locations.

In _ss_environment.php (with trailing slash!):

$_FILE_TO_URL_MAPPING['/var/www/my-site'] = 'http://your-domain.co.nz/';

In your config file (without traling slash!):

FilesystemPublisher:
	static_base_url: http://your-domain.co.nz

If using subsites, this will only apply to the main site. Subsites will use their respective domains as configured in the CMS.

This section contains some examples of webserver configuration.

The .htaccess can pass all requests to a separate PHP file for pre-processing. We've included an example file to get you started: docs/en/stale-static-main.example.php.

The Apache web-server looks in the following order to find cached results

• cache/url-segment-of-page.html
• cache/url-segment-of-page.stale.html
• passes to framework/main.php

There are suggested nginx.conf and nginx.vhost files located in the /docs/ subfolder that will do the same as the mysite/stale-static-main.php and if no cached file exists pass it on to Apache backend.

These are just examples and don't pay too much attention to the security of the system. You will need to customise these for your critical systems.

Recommended cronjob entries to go into a crontab:

# Cronjob for processing the static publishing queue
* * * * * www-data /sites/my-website/www/framework/sake dev/tasks/BuildStaticCacheFromQueue daemon=1 verbose=0 >> /tmp/buildstaticcache.log

# Rebuild the entire static cache at 1am every night".
0 1 * * * www-data /sites/my-website/www/framework/sake dev/tasks/SiteTreeFullBuildEngine flush=all

This section contains a more in-depth discussion on the details of the module.

This module comes with two essential interfaces: StaticPublishingTrigger and StaticallyPublishable. This interfaces allow objects to define their capabilities related to static publishing.

StaticPublishingTrigger should be assigned to an object which is interested in updating other objects as a result of some change of state. An example here is a Page with some associated objects - changes to these objects need to trigger republishing of the Page, but they are not themselves published.

StaticallyPublishable complements the trigger. It is assigned to objects which want to be statically published. Objects are able to claim any amount of URLs (inlcuding their own, and also any sub-urls). It is important that each URL is only claimed once, by a single object. If you need to trigger republishing or URLs assigned to another objects, implement the StaticPublishingTrigger. In our example of Page with related objects, the Page would be publishable, but the objects wouldn't.

Most of the time the Objects will be both acting as triggers (e.g. for themselves) and as publishable objects (generating HTML files).

The interfaces are designed to be consumed by engines which are responsible for putting the desired behaviours into action. This module provides the following two engines:

• SiteTreePublishingEngine - regenerates the static cache files after a page is published/unpublished. This makes use of both interfaces as object trigger refresh of other objects.
• SiteTreeFullBuildEngine - intended to be an overnight task for making sure entire cache is regenerated. This uses just one of the interfaces as what triggers what is not important for a bulk regeneration.

As long as you respect the provided interfaces, any modifications will work well with the default engines. This means that the only thing left for you to do is to define behaviours:

• what triggers publishing of what (StaticPublishingTrigger interface)
• what URLs belong to an object and need to be updated when object changes (StaticallyPublishable interface).

You can provide your own implementations by creating new extensions (see PublishableRedirectorPage for a simple example). You apply these as normal through the config system. You can also implement the interfaces directly on your classes without using extensions. will override all static publisher extensions already present.

Some implementations of the aforementioned interfaces are bundled with this module. The PublishableSiteTree supports the basic static publishing functionality for SiteTree objects - updating itself and the parent on change, and deleting itself and updating parent on deletion.

PublishableRedirectorPage is a slight variation that is designed to couple with the RedirectorPage, and makes sure this page is published into HTML.

If not using subsites, all static files will go into cache directory in the webroot (unless reconfigured).

If using subsites, each subsite domain will trigger generation of a full copy of the static site into a subdirectory named after the domain, e.g. cache/your-subsite.co.nz.

Events are the preferred way to fill the queue in a way that allows you to build arbitrary dependencies.

Quick example: An event could be fired when a user is saved, and a listener on a forum thread queues up a rebuild of all his forum post pages. But at the same time, another listener is registered to queue a rebuild a hypothetical "all forum members" list. The user logic doesn't need to know about the object being displayed in forum threads or member lists.

The system is configured in the _config.php with registering events with event listeners.

StaticPagesQueueEvent::register_event('MyEvent', 'MyEventListener'):

This means that the event MyEvent gets triggered, it will notify all objects that implements the interface MyEventListener.

The events most likely triggered in a onAfterWrite() or onBeforeDelete(). This is how a class would trigger a MyEvent:

public function onAfterWrite() {
	parent::onAfterWrite();
	StaticPagesQueueEvent::fire_event(new MyEvent($this));
}

The MyEvent takes an reference to the DataObject that triggers this event.

The Event system then calls every implementator of the MyEventListener with the method Object#MyEvent(Event $event). This gives the implementator a reference to the original triggerer.

The listener (implementor) takes care of collecting a list of URLs that needs to be updated in it's control.

This list of URLs are then sent to a URLArrayObject.

The URLArrayObject class has a static function that you can use to add pages directly to the static publishing queue. This is especially useful if you don't need the layer of indirection that the events system provides. Here is a code example:

//Insert a bunch of pages
$pages = Page::get();
foreach($pages as $page) {
	if ($page->URLSegment == RootURLController::get_homepage_link()) {
		//high priority page that should be republished before other pages
		$urls[$page->Link()] = 90;
	} else {
		//regular page with default priority of 50
		$urls[] = $page->Link();
	}
}
URLArrayObject::add_urls($urls);

At the end of the PHP execution cycle (when the object's _destruct() method is called) the object inserts all the added URLs into the database. Everything gets inserted in one big insert, rather than doing a whole bunch of slow database insert queries.

It also provides an interface for smuggling contextual information about the related object within the GET parameters of the URL.

This DataObject takes of manipulating a list of URLs with priorities and status that is stored in the database.

It also removes (if existing) a fresh page and leaving the system with a stale page in the cache.

A cronjob or a user triggers the following task, which installs itself as a resident daemon:

framework/sake dev/tasks/BuildStaticCacheFromQueue daemon=1 verbose=0

It will ask the StaticPagesQueue to give it urls, sorted by priority, one by one. And recaches them by using the FilesystemPublisher. This will generate a fresh page and a stale page in the cache.

This task uses a pid file to prevent launching two processes in parallel. It is recommended to run this from a cronjob every minute to make sure the task is alive.

You can run this once-off from command line for debugging purposes using: daemon=0 verbose=1.

This task will rebuild the cache in full, making sure all changes have been flushed:

framework/sake dev/tasks/SiteTreeFullBuildEngine flush=all

We recommend running this nightly to catch all discrepancies from in-flight updates.

When using the MySQL database, the static publish queue automatically uses locking to ensure that no two processes grab an item from the static publishing queue at the same time. This allows any number of processes to build the static cache concurrently. That is, if the static cache is shared between multiple servers, then all the servers can work together to re-build the static cache.

A "stale page" is just a copy of the fresh one with a little extra HTML content in it that tells a visitor that the page is stale. It lives in the same directory structure as the other cached files, but has a .stale.html suffix. This stale copy comes into play as a fallback when the actual cached file is invalidated

To use the stale pages, you need to make sure your webserver is configured to serve these files as a fallback if the main file is not available.

You also need to include the following snippet in your template so the module knows where to inject the "this page is stale" message:

<div id="stale"></div>

There are two reports in the admin that shows this information: StaticPagesQueueReport and BuildStaticCacheSummaryReport SilverStripe 3 will automatically register these reports and they will show up in the admin/reports tab. Both reports automatically updates themselves every few seconds so you can monitor the state of the queues in real-time.