LSCache + Craft CMS Configuration

LSCache, similar to Varnish cache, is a simpler and more efficient page caching solution built-in to LiteSpeed Web Server. When used in conjunction with Craft CMS, you can expect significant performance gains with a quick and easy setup. Cache management is also made significantly easier and more flexible. Rewrite rules can still be used to customize LSCache's behavior.

Below are some recommended configurations to enable LSCache and get it working with your Craft CMS site(s).

Server/VirtualHost level cache storage needs to be configured properly for your environment. Select your server setup from the Web Server Configuration section of our LiteSpeed Cache Installation Guide and follow the instructions to set the server/virtual host level cache root and cache policy.

Rewrite rules should be added to your .htaccess file, located in the document root of your website. It may contain the following:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine On
      # Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
      RewriteRule (.+) index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Place rewrite ruls on the top of the existing rules to cache all URLs for 2 mins excluding /admin URLs

########## Begin - Litespeed cache
<IfModule LiteSpeed>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^HEAD|GET$
  RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !/admin
  RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !/index.php/admin    
  RewriteRule .* - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=120]
</IfModule>
########## End - Litespeed cache

Open your browsers inspector, by right-clicking and selecting “Inspector” or pressing the F12 key, and refresh the page. Under the “Network” tab look for the HTML page you just loaded and clikc on it to view it's response header.

In the response header you should see X-LiteSpeed-Cache: hit to indicate that the page was served from cache successfully. If you see X-LiteSpeed-Cache: miss, reload the page and check again.

Note: LSWS will now delete expired cache files automatically, making this step optional. A cron job can still be set up to help ensure that the cache works as expected, clearing out pages that may have been misconfigured to have a very long TTL.

A cron job should be set to clear out old cache files that are past the set Time To Live (TTL).

To do this, you should run the crontab either as the root user or as the cache owner for self management.

crontab -e

The virtual host cache root directory is normally located in /home/$USER/lscache for shared hosting users or /tmp/diskspace for dedicated servers.

*/10 * * * * root find /virtualhost/cache/root/directory/ -type f -mmin +8 -delete 2>/dev/null

Note: This cron job deletes cached files that are more than 8 minutes old every 10 minutes. Since the cache TTL is set at 120 seconds (2 minutes), it is safe to delete these files as they are way past their TTL.

The lscache could be incorrectly enabled on server level globally. You can either correct the wrong lscache setting “Enable Public Cache” to “not set” or “no” according to this recommendations, or just disable global setting for a particular virtual host in .htaccess first before the rewrite rules.

########## Begin - Litespeed cache
<IfModule LiteSpeed>
 RewriteEngine On
 CacheDisable public /
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^HEAD|GET$
 RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !/admin
 RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !/index.php/admin    
 RewriteRule .* - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=120]
</IfModule>
########## End - Litespeed cache

Note: The “CacheDisable public /” directive is used to help protect against globally enabled caching. The Rewrite rules will enable cache.