Re: Yet another Hydra mirror: hydra-mirror.marusich.info

[Chris Marusich]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Nice!  Are you using the nginx config that’s in guix-maintenance.git?

No, I'm not using that at the moment. In the future, if I set up any
nginx servers to accomplish the same task, I will definitely use it. I
would prefer to run my own servers, but for now this is something I can
do immediately to help the project, so I decided to do it.

CloudFront is a service, so you use its API (or the AWS Management
Console, which is a web UI for the API) to create a "distribution" and
configure it to use hydra.gnu.org as its "origin". A little extra work
is required to glue everything together. For example, I had to create a
CNAME pointing from hydra-mirror.marusich.info to
d2xj50ygrk34qq.cloudfront.net, which is the canonical name of my
distribution. Once it's configured, all requests sent to
hydra-mirror.marusich.info are serviced by a nearby point of presence in
the CloudFront content distribution network, and the results are cached.

I've noticed that Hydra does not include cache-related headers (e.g.,
Cache-Control). Perhaps for this reason, the nginx config you linked
seems to pick arbitrary caching settings. When using CloudFront, a
distribution can be configured to respect the Cache-Control headers sent
by the origin server. Does nginx provide similar functionality? Would it
make sense to have hydra.gnu.org return such headers?

For now, I've configured hydra-mirror.marusich.info to cache all
successful requests for 1 week, and to respect cache-related headers
from the hydra.gnu.org if it ever decides to send them. This seemed like
a reasonable configuration for data which is not expected to change.

Chris