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Adding caching to Flask apps

By Dan Jacob filed in Performance

Werkzeug includes a number of caching options in the werkzeug.contrib.cache package: werkzeug.contrib.cache

However the API just handles low-level caching - this is handy for caching individual objects (such as the results of a database query) but not if you want to cache an entire view, or even a whole site.

For a per-view cache we can use a decorator:

from werkzeug.contrib.cache import SimpleCache

CACHE_TIMEOUT = 300

cache = SimpleCache()

class cached(object):

    def __init__(self, timeout=None):
        self.timeout = timeout or CACHE_TIMEOUT

    def __call__(self, f):
        def decorator(*args, **kwargs):
            response = cache.get(request.path)
            if response is None:
                response = f(*args, **kwargs)
                cache.set(request.path, response, self.timeout)
            return response
        return decorator

@app.route("/")
@cached()
def index():
    return render_template("index.html")

This example uses SimpleCache, for production you probably want to use memcached.

To cache your whole application, you can use before_request and after_request:

@app.before_request
def return_cached():
    # if GET and POST not empty
    if not request.values:
        response = cache.get(request.path)
        if response: 
            return response

@app.after_request
def cache_response(response):
    if not request.values:
        cache.set(request.path, response, CACHE_TIMEOUT)
    return response

We ignore the cache if the GET or POST are not empty.

You might want to modify these functions further; for example, you might want to ignore the cache in certain views by setting an "ignore_cache" flag in the request or g objects, or if the user is authenticated.

For template-level caching in Jinja2, see this example: Cache Example Extension

This snippet by Dan Jacob can be used freely for anything you like. Consider it public domain.

© Copyright 2010 by Armin Ronacher // sign in