How to flush nginx pagespeed cache on a Ubuntu server?

How to flush nginx pagespeed cache on a Ubuntu server?

What is nginx pagespeed?

It is actually a third party dynamic module for nginx, which can be compiled into nginx server. It is provided by Google PageSpeed, a suite of tools for measuring and optimizing the performance of your website. 


Flushing pagespeed cache

After compiling nginx pagespeed module, the pagespeed cache is not getting cleared after running the cache flush command.
To flush nginx pagespeed cache you must run a simple touch command against the directory specified as FileCachePath in your nginx configuration file for the server.  Touch command is actually used to create empty files in linux. 
  1. sudo touch /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache/cache.flush 

This will create an empty file in the directory with path /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache. These files are actually ignored from the Pagespeed cache until they are finally deleted. In short, after running this touch command, the previous cache files already stored gets invalidated.

Alert : The steps down below are not necessary, especially for live sites, as visitor might see a 500 error. Although, if you still want to remove cache files forcefully, after they are invalidated, run the rm (used to delete files in linux) command.

Remove the files from /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache directory.
  1. sudo rm -rf /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache/*

After that, restart Nginx to apply changes :

  1. sudo service nginx restart


You can now check manually. The cache files will start to generate in the /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache directory after restarting nginx webserver.

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