Angry Caching Proxy

Make package downloads lightning fast for apt-get, npm, pip and Rubygems!

Angry Caching Proxy is forwarding proxy for various package managers. It is configured transparently to the clients using the http_proxy environment variable. So there is no need to have customized sources.list, Gemfile etc.

It works by doing very angry caching (forever!) for the actual package files. This should be ok as long as the package authors won't override already uploaded packages. It is a very bad practice by the package authors and happens very rarely. If it happens anyway you can always clear the cache from the web interface of Angry Caching Proxy.

Use cases

Installing or upgrading multiple Ubuntu machines. In the worst case you have to download gigabytes of .deb packages for each machine. With Angry Caching Proxy the packages are downloaded once and then served instantly from the cache.

When doing distributed builds it might be hard to share local disk caches.

Just speeding up your local bundle install runs.

Install

Get node.js and type

sudo npm install -g angry-caching-proxy

or if you don't like sudoing random code you can install it locally too:

npm install angry-caching-proxy

and execute it with

node_modules/.bin/angry-caching-proxy

Configuration

Create /etc/angry-caching-proxy/config.json with any of the following keys:

• directory: Where to store cached requests.
• port: Port to listen.
  • default: 8080
• workers: Workers to use. Default to machine cpu core count.
• customTriggers: Path to custom triggers module.
  • default: /etc/angry-caching-proxy/triggers.js
• triggers: Array of triggers to activate.
  • default ["apt-get", "npm", "pypi", "rubygems"]

Custom triggers

If you want to add additional caching you can create /etc/angry-caching-proxy/triggers.js file with your own caching functions. It should export an object of functions that return true when the request should be cached. The caching occurs only if the upstream responds with http success status 200. Only GET requests can be cached.

Example:

module.exports = {
    "custom": function isMyCustomCacheRequest(req, res) {
        // Cache all requests that contain X-My-Cache header
        return req.headers["X-My-Cache"]);
    },
};

See buildin-triggers.js for examples.

New build-in triggers are also welcome as a pull request.

Usage

Create directory where to save cached requests

mkdir cache

and start the server

angry-caching-proxy --directory cache

You can inspect and clear the cache by browsing directly to the proxy address http://localhost:8080

apt-get

http_proxy=http://localhost:8080 sudo -E apt-get install sl

Bundler (Rubygems)

http_proxy=http://localhost:8080 bundle install

npm

With npm it is required to use the non-https version of the registry

http_proxy=http://localhost:8080 npm install --registry http://registry.npmjs.org/

Python pip

With pip use the non-https version of the registry:

http_proxy=http://localhost:8080 pip install  --index-url http://pypi.python.org/simple plone

Cool guys can also set the proxy globally for everybody:

export http_proxy=http://localhost:8080