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About this tool
Plan Cache-Control and expires directives per asset type and copy a ready nginx location-block snippet.
This planner turns a per-asset-type caching policy into ready nginx location blocks that set Cache-Control and expires correctly, using the response directives defined in RFC 9111 plus the immutable extension from RFC 8246. It ships the widely used default strategy — HTML always revalidated, hash-named CSS/JS and fonts cached for one year as immutable, images for 30 days — and knows that nginx's expires directive already emits a Cache-Control: max-age header, so it never generates duplicate headers.
Open Nginx Cache Header Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Paste your code or data sample into the workspace.
Pick the format, conversion, or analysis you need.
Copy the polished result straight back into your project.
Plain max-age policies use expires alone; richer policies use add_header — never both on one location.
public, private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate and immutable are combined per RFC 9111/8246 semantics.
Extensions, durations and flags are editable for each asset class, with a 10-year sanity cap on max-age.
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable — one year plus the immutable directive from RFC 8246, which tells browsers to skip revalidation entirely. This is safe only because the filename hash changes whenever the content does, so a new deploy naturally busts the cache.
HTML should normally be sent with Cache-Control: no-cache, which lets browsers store the page but forces a revalidation on every use. Long-caching HTML is the classic cause of users seeing an old page that references deleted hashed assets after a deploy.
no-cache allows a response to be stored but requires it to be revalidated with the server before every reuse, while no-store forbids storing the response at all. Use no-store only for genuinely sensitive responses, because it eliminates even conditional-request savings.
Yes — expires emits both an Expires header and a Cache-Control: max-age=N header calculated from the same duration. That is why combining expires with your own add_header Cache-Control line produces two Cache-Control headers; this planner uses one mechanism or the other, never both.