This package provides a custom template tag library that allows the user to implement a secondary cache back-end without altering their default in CACHES.

This is currently configured for a file-based cache that parses the URL of the requested page and a list of vary_on attributes to generate unique cache keys. It can be easily modified to accommodate other methods of key generation and other cache back-ends, or extended to create additional tags for yet more caches side by side.

This package is intended for Django versions < 1.8, as 1.8+ added this functionality to the native {% cache %} tag.

1. Add "-e git+https://github.com/baronvonvaderham/django-file-cache-tag.git#egg=file-cache-tag" and "django-adv-cache-tag" to requirements.txt.

2. Add "file_cache_tag" and "adv_cache_tag" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting like this::

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       ...
       'file_cache_tag',
       'adv_cache_tag',
   )
   

3. Run "pip install -r requirements.txt" from your project's directory to install required packages.

4. Run "python manage.py migrate" to create the required models.

5. Modify your CACHES setting like this::

   CACHES = { 'default': { ... }, 'filecache': { 'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.filebased.FileBasedCache', 'LOCATION': FILECACHE_DIRECTORY, } }

6. Add a FILECACHE_DIRECTORY setting to settings.py, either as an absolute path or as accepting an environment variable::

   FILECACHE_DIRECTORY = os.environ.get("FILECACHE_DIRECTORY", "/CACHE/filecache/")

Any number of args can be accepted into the tag. All will be hashed and returned in FileBasedCacheTag.get_cache_key_args()['hash'].

Templates::

    {% load custom_caching %}
    {% file_cache [expiration time] request.get_full_path arg1 arg2 ... %}
    ...
    {% endfile_cache %}

Views:

Methods from this package will be called within views to manually reconstruct
cache keys and invalidate individual cache versions. A separate method is provided
for key generation and invalidation. It is important to provide the arguments used
in the template for that view in the same order in a simple list, and to loop
through all possible keys within the view itself; the package will not know to
find each possible version of the page.

This is most often implemented at the end of a method that updates a model being
displayed. This ensures that as of the time of saving new data, the cache is now
invalid.