meteor edgee:fastly

Serves your meteor app through the Fastly CDN

Install

meteor add edgee:fastly

Benefits

This package caches your apps' static and dynamic resources on datacenters accross the world using the Fastly CDN to maximise response time of your app as well as reduce greatly your server load.

In typical Meteor app the client side code base can exceed 1MB for which a nodejs http server is not best suited to serve it. By caching it on a CDN that burden is significantly reduced.

Setup

Websockets / DDP

On deployment run the app with the DDP_DEFAULT_CONNECTION_URL set to the back end URL so that meteor will bypass the CDN for DDP connections (websockets):

# Example:
export ROOT_URL=https://www.my-meteor-app.com # Users access your app here
export DDP_DEFAULT_CONNECTION_URL=//my-meteor-app.herokuapp.com # Your app lives here

Purge Cache on Update

Purge cache whenever you push a new release of your App, by running .autoupdate() when your app starts up. Just add the following code to your app:

//Instantiate the fastly client:
if (Meteor.isServer) {
    var fastly = new Fastly(Meteor.settings.fastly.apiKey);

    //Automatically purge cache for old app versions:
    fastly.autoupdate(Meteor.settings.fastly.serviceId);
}

Auto-Configure Fastly Service with domain and SSL

If you don't want to configure your fastly instance manually you can add the following to code above.

fastly.configure(Meteor.settings.fastly.serviceId, options);

Options is optional and takes following keys:

forceSSL: Boolean if ssl is forced for the client and backend connection. default value is false unless the "force-ssl" package is enabled.

httpsPort: Port at which https runs on the backend. Default is "443".

domain: The domain that the CDN is to use. Default is ROOT_URL.

backendUrl: The url at which meteor is hosted. The default is process.env.DDP_DEFAULT_CONNECTION_URL.

requestSettingsName: Name of request Settings set to create. The default is "Default".

If you were to skip this step then your meteor app will keep refreshing the client until the CDN cache is invalided after an update.

Fastly Client

The package provides the node client for fastly.

The entire api of that client has been decorated to allow synchronous runs:

Asynchronous run:

var fastly = new Fastly('yourapikey');

fastly.request('GET', '/content/edge_check?url=mysite.com/foo', function (err, obj) {
    if (err) return console.dir(err);   // Oh no!
    console.dir(obj);                   // Response body from the fastly API
});

Synchronous run:

var fastly = new Fastly('yourapikey');

// (throws error on failure)
var obj = fastly.request('GET', '/content/edge_check?url=mysite.com/foo');

console.dir(obj); // Response body from the fastly API

Fast-Render

This package works well with meteorhacks:fast-render.

Fast render publishes data directly to the boilerplate, which in turn will be cached on the Fastly CDN. That means that visitors will see content even before the Mongo Database is ever hit.

However at this point this package does will not automatically invalidate the cache for when the data published by fast-render is updated. Normally this is not a problem, as the content will then be updated once the DDP connection is established.

By default cache will expire after 1 hour when fast-render is enabled.

Cache-Control

By default the package sends out the following header for all html pages, when autoupdate() is applied:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400

This tells fastly to keep the page in cache for 24 hours.

If fast-render is enabled, that default is automatically reduced to 1 hour.

You can change it age by providing a second argument to the autoupdate function:

fastly.autoupdate(yourFastlyServiceId, 5*3600); //cache for 5 hours

In a more advanced setup where you want to have different cache-control headers, you can disble this package from serving the header by setting it to null:

fastly.autoupdate(yourFastlyServiceId, null); //Do not send cache-control headers

Now you can use add your custom headers like this:

WebApp.connectHandlers.use("/someurl", function (request, response, next) {
   //Tell the CDN to not cache this page (proxy it instead)
   res.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-store");
   next();
});

You could also use a server-side router such as meteorhacks:picker.