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WordPress nocache_headers() vs. Nginx

Typically, you can call WordPress’ nocache_headers() function when you don’t want content to be cached. Typically, but when you’re serving from behind Nginx as a reverse proxy, consideration must be paid.

It’s a year old now, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by it, but this thread on the Nginx forums explains that Cache-Control: private headers are meaningless when Nginx is being used as a reverse proxy:

nginx completely ignores the ‘private’ keyword and will cache your document regardless.

The recommendation is for the upstream app to send an X-Accel-Expires: 0 header.

The easy fix? Add a filter to nocache_headers() that inserts the additional header:

add_action( 'nocache_headers' , 'my_nocache_headers' , 1 );
function my_nocache_headers( $headers )
{
	$headers['X-Accel-Expires'] = 0;
	return $headers;
}