Quick Tips

Quicktip: Simple File Based Cache Mechanism in PHP

September 2, 2011 in php, Quick Tips

Simple, yet effective enough, this is all the code I used to create caching for a feed retrieval to speed up subsequent requests.

Enjoy!

< ? php

/**

 * @param string $uniqID - Anything that would be unique to what you are caching (url/database query)

 * @param integer $expireSeconds - How old is too old that we refresh the cache

 */

function _getFromCache($uniqID, $expireSeconds) {

  $uniq = '/
/’.md5($uniqID);

  if (file_exists($uniq) && time() – filemtime($uniq) < = $expireSeconds) {

    return '
($uniq)’;

  }

  $somethingToCache = ‘($uniqID)’;

  file_put_contents($uniq, $somethingToCache); //You will want to implement __toString() if this is an object or maybe you can just serialize it

  return $somethingToCache;

}