Avoiding serving from cache when cookie is not set (GeoIP/cookie)

[erus00]

Hi Karl,

We have several websites for different geographical locations (AU, US, UK, NZ). When a first time visitor comes the Geolocation of the client (GeoLoc) is compared with the website's location (WebLoc).

• If GeoLoc is within the catchment area of WebLoc then we let the client browse the website.
• If GeoLoc is not withing the catchment area of WebLoc we use a plugin called "modal-window" to show a popup suggesting redirection to the appropriate website. In doing so a cookie will be created with the ID of the zone/WebLoc (wow-modal-id-1=yes or wow-modal-id-2=yes or wow-modal-id-3=yes or wow-modal-id-4=yes) if the client decides to stay on the "wrong" website.

The issue that I was having is that since I installed nginx-more new visitors were served pages from the cache with a popup suggesting a redirection that was not appropriate for their GeoLoc. php-fpm was not reached.

I am using : /etc/nginx/conf.d/custom/fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf

After some research I came up with the following modification for "fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf " in an attempt to bypass the cache for clients who did not receive a cookie saying that they accepted to stay on the website (=new visitors):

Solution 1 - This seems to work:

if ($http_cookie !~* "wow-modal-id-1=yes|wow-modal-id-2=yes|wow-modal-id-3=yes|wow-modal-id-4=yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}

Solution 2 - I was also considering the following but did not try it as Solution 1 works:

if ($cookie_wow-modal-id-1 != "yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}
if ($cookie_wow-modal-id-2 != "yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}
if ($cookie_wow-modal-id-3 != "yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}
if ($cookie_wow-modal-id-4 != "yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}

Solution 1 seems to work perfectly in case the visitor comes to the wrong website as the cache is BYPASS until one of the wow-modal-id-* is activated by the user closing the popup and choosing to stay on the "wrong" website.

New issue: The issue is now that if the visitor comes to the correct website for their GeoLoc then "modal-window" is not triggered so wow-modal-id-* cookie is not established so all the pages are BYPASS which is not desireable.

To correct this behavior I now created a new cookie (Z-Visted=yes) that is given when we established that the visitor is on the correct website then I modified Solution 1 to include it:

if ($http_cookie !~* "Z-Visited=yes|wow-modal-id-1=yes|wow-modal-id-2=yes|wow-modal-id-3=yes|wow-modal-id-4=yes") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
}

Questions: 1- I was wondering if you already created a solution to address these kind of issues in Nginx-More and if you had a more elegant way to do it? 2- I was wondering what happen to the .conf files like "fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf" in case of update of nginx-more? => Should I put all the changes in a custom .conf file to avoid to be overwritten?

Thank you very much Karl.

[karljohns0n]

Hi,

1- I was wondering if you already created a solution to address these kind of issues in Nginx-More and if you had a more elegant way to do it?

I didn't run into this issue so far so I can't help with this. Feel free to share your solution here so other users can benefit of it or you could ask on nginx mailing list.

2- I was wondering what happen to the .conf files like "fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf" in case of update of nginx-more? => Should I put all the changes in a custom .conf file to avoid to be overwritten?

Nginx-more updates wont overwrite changes in configuration files such as fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf. If you modify it and there's changes in a new update, yum will create fpm-wordpress-cache-users.conf.rpmnew so you will be able to diff the files and apply changes if you want. You can also create your own custom conf, it's up to you!

Karl

[erus00]

Thanks Karl