Trying to implement "far-future expiration date" for static files in django

Question

I am attempting to use the far future expires method to cut down my site's load time.

However when I access static files in firefox, the server still responds with HTTP/1.x 304 NOT MODIFIED. The request shouldn't even be made if the files are cached right?

Here are the relevant httpd.conf lines I have for apache 2.2:

LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpe?g|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year" </FilesMatch>

YSlow says that none of the static files have a far-future expiration date. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Add this line to your conf:

FileETag none

(although make sure it's only for your static files, because etag could still be useful for your dynamic Django views)

Answer 2

I'm not sure if the ExpiresActive On belongs in the FilesMatch directive. I've got much the same thing implemented, and I put it outside.

From the docs, it looks like it doesn't belong there:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/httpserv/manual60/mod/mod%5Fexpires.html#expiresactive

I've got the expires header set on the directories with static files:

ExpiresActive On
<Directory /path/to/static/files>
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 6 months"
    Header append Cache-Control public
</Directory>