Caching

Caching is a great and simple technique that helps improve your app’s performance. It acts as a temporary data store providing high performance data access.

Installation

First install required packages:

  1. $ npm install cache-manager
  2. $ npm install -D @types/cache-manager

In-memory cache

Nest provides a unified API for various cache storage providers. The built-in one is an in-memory data store. However, you can easily switch to a more comprehensive solution, like Redis.

In order to enable caching, import the CacheModule and call its register() method.

  1. import { CacheModule, Module } from '@nestjs/common';
  2. import { AppController } from './app.controller';
  4. @Module({
  5.   imports: [CacheModule.register()],
  6.   controllers: [AppController],
  7. })
  8. export class AppModule {}

Interacting with the Cache store

To interact with the cache manager instance, inject it to your class using the CACHE_MANAGER token, as follows:

  1. constructor(@Inject(CACHE_MANAGER) private cacheManager: Cache) {}

info Hint The Cache class is imported from the cache-manager, while CACHE_MANAGER token from the @nestjs/common package.

The get method on the Cache instance (from the cache-manager package) is used to retrieve items from the cache. If the item does not exist in the cache, null will be returned.

  1. const value = await this.cacheManager.get('key');

To add an item to the cache, use the set method:

  1. await this.cacheManager.set('key', 'value');

The default expiration time of the cache is 5 seconds.

You can manually specify a TTL (expiration time in seconds) for this specific key, as follows:

  1. await this.cacheManager.set('key', 'value', { ttl: 1000 });

To disable expiration of the cache, set the ttl configuration property to 0:

  1. await this.cacheManager.set('key', 'value', { ttl: 0 });

To remove an item from the cache, use the del method:

  1. await this.cacheManager.del('key');

To clear the entire cache, use the reset method:

  1. await this.cacheManager.reset();

Auto-caching responses

warning Warning In GraphQL applications, interceptors are executed separately for each field resolver. Thus, CacheModule (which uses interceptors to cache responses) will not work properly.

To enable auto-caching responses, just tie the CacheInterceptor where you want to cache data.

  1. @Controller()
  2. @UseInterceptors(CacheInterceptor)
  3. export class AppController {
  4.   @Get()
  5.   findAll(): string[] {
  6.     return [];
  7.   }
  8. }

warningWarning Only GET endpoints are cached. Also, HTTP server routes that inject the native response object (@Res()) cannot use the Cache Interceptor. See response mapping for more details.

To reduce the amount of required boilerplate, you can bind CacheInterceptor to all endpoints globally:

  1. import { CacheModule, Module, CacheInterceptor } from '@nestjs/common';
  2. import { AppController } from './app.controller';
  3. import { APP_INTERCEPTOR } from '@nestjs/core';
  5. @Module({
  6.   imports: [CacheModule.register()],
  7.   controllers: [AppController],
  8.   providers: [
  9.     {
  10.       provide: APP_INTERCEPTOR,
  11.       useClass: CacheInterceptor,
  12.     },
  13.   ],
  14. })
  15. export class AppModule {}

Customize caching

All cached data has its own expiration time (TTL). To customize default values, pass the options object to the register() method.

  1. CacheModule.register({
  2.   ttl: 5, // seconds
  3.   max: 10, // maximum number of items in cache
  4. });

Global cache overrides

While global cache is enabled, cache entries are stored under a CacheKey that is auto-generated based on the route path. You may override certain cache settings (@CacheKey() and @CacheTTL()) on a per-method basis, allowing customized caching strategies for individual controller methods. This may be most relevant while using different cache stores.

  1. @Controller()
  2. export class AppController {
  3.   @CacheKey('custom_key')
  4.   @CacheTTL(20)
  5.   findAll(): string[] {
  6.     return [];
  7.   }
  8. }

info Hint The @CacheKey() and @CacheTTL() decorators are imported from the @nestjs/common package.

The @CacheKey() decorator may be used with or without a corresponding @CacheTTL() decorator and vice versa. One may choose to override only the @CacheKey() or only the @CacheTTL(). Settings that are not overridden with a decorator will use the default values as registered globally (see Customize caching).

WebSockets and Microservices

You can also apply the CacheInterceptor to WebSocket subscribers as well as Microservice’s patterns (regardless of the transport method that is being used).

  1. @@filename()
  2. @CacheKey('events')
  3. @UseInterceptors(CacheInterceptor)
  4. @SubscribeMessage('events')
  5. handleEvent(client: Client, data: string[]): Observable<string[]> {
  6.   return [];
  7. }
  8. @@switch
  9. @CacheKey('events')
  10. @UseInterceptors(CacheInterceptor)
  11. @SubscribeMessage('events')
  12. handleEvent(client, data) {
  13.   return [];
  14. }

However, the additional @CacheKey() decorator is required in order to specify a key used to subsequently store and retrieve cached data. Also, please note that you shouldn’t cache everything. Actions which perform some business operations rather than simply querying the data should never be cached.

Additionally, you may specify a cache expiration time (TTL) by using the @CacheTTL() decorator, which will override the global default TTL value.

  1. @@filename()
  2. @CacheTTL(10)
  3. @UseInterceptors(CacheInterceptor)
  4. @SubscribeMessage('events')
  5. handleEvent(client: Client, data: string[]): Observable<string[]> {
  6.   return [];
  7. }
  8. @@switch
  9. @CacheTTL(10)
  10. @UseInterceptors(CacheInterceptor)
  11. @SubscribeMessage('events')
  12. handleEvent(client, data) {
  13.   return [];
  14. }

info Hint The @CacheTTL() decorator may be used with or without a corresponding @CacheKey() decorator.

Adjust tracking

By default, Nest uses the request URL (in an HTTP app) or cache key (in websockets and microservices apps, set through the @CacheKey() decorator) to associate cache records with your endpoints. Nevertheless, sometimes you might want to set up tracking based on different factors, for example, using HTTP headers (e.g. Authorization to properly identify profile endpoints).

In order to accomplish that, create a subclass of CacheInterceptor and override the trackBy() method.

  1. @Injectable()
  2. class HttpCacheInterceptor extends CacheInterceptor {
  3.   trackBy(context: ExecutionContext): string | undefined {
  4.     return 'key';
  5.   }
  6. }

Different stores

This service takes advantage of cache-manager under the hood. The cache-manager package supports a wide-range of useful stores, for example, Redis store. A full list of supported stores is available here. To set up the Redis store, simply pass the package together with corresponding options to the register() method.

  1. import * as redisStore from 'cache-manager-redis-store';
  2. import { CacheModule, Module } from '@nestjs/common';
  3. import { AppController } from './app.controller';
  5. @Module({
  6.   imports: [
  7.     CacheModule.register({
  8.       store: redisStore,
  9.       host: 'localhost',
  10.       port: 6379,
  11.     }),
  12.   ],
  13.   controllers: [AppController],
  14. })
  15. export class AppModule {}

Async configuration

You may want to asynchronously pass in module options instead of passing them statically at compile time. In this case, use the registerAsync() method, which provides several ways to deal with async configuration.

One approach is to use a factory function:

  1. CacheModule.registerAsync({
  2.   useFactory: () => ({
  3.     ttl: 5,
  4.   }),
  5. });

Our factory behaves like all other asynchronous module factories (it can be async and is able to inject dependencies through inject).

  1. CacheModule.registerAsync({
  2.   imports: [ConfigModule],
  3.   useFactory: async (configService: ConfigService) => ({
  4.     ttl: configService.get('CACHE_TTL'),
  5.   }),
  6.   inject: [ConfigService],
  7. });

Alternatively, you can use the useClass method:

  1. CacheModule.registerAsync({
  2.   useClass: CacheConfigService,
  3. });

The above construction will instantiate CacheConfigService inside CacheModule and will use it to get the options object. The CacheConfigService has to implement the CacheOptionsFactory interface in order to provide the configuration options:

  1. @Injectable()
  2. class CacheConfigService implements CacheOptionsFactory {
  3.   createCacheOptions(): CacheModuleOptions {
  4.     return {
  5.       ttl: 5,
  6.     };
  7.   }
  8. }

If you wish to use an existing configuration provider imported from a different module, use the useExisting syntax:

  1. CacheModule.registerAsync({
  2.   imports: [ConfigModule],
  3.   useExisting: ConfigService,
  4. });

This works the same as useClass with one critical difference - CacheModule will lookup imported modules to reuse any already-created ConfigService, instead of instantiating its own.

Example

A working example is available here.