Pelican Cache Module

Pelican cache module (cache.py) is relatively independent of other modules. It uses pickle module to serialize data and logger module to output debug and warning messages. The module defines two classes FileDataCacher and FileStampDataCacher. The FileStampDataCacher class derives from FileDataCacher and adds file stamp to serialized data. File stamp could be modified time or a hash value of file content. Both classes have four methods __init__, get_cached_data, cache_data, and save_cache. The concept code below shows how they work.

content = get_cached_data(path)
if content is None:
    content = read(path)
    cache_data(path, content)
    save_cache()

The Pelican documentation has a section “Reading only modified content” on how to use caching. You should at least set those two setting values to True to turn on caching.

CACHE_CONTENT

True to save cache; default is False.

LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE

True to load cache; default is False.

Other cache related settings are listed below.

CACHE_PATH

default is cache; caching files are saved in this directory.

CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER

Readers and CachingGenerators classes are derived from FileStampDataCacher. You can set the value to ‘reader’ or ‘generator’; default value is reader.

GZIP_CACHE

use GZIP package to compress caching file; default is True.

CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD

method to check if a file is modified sincing last caching; default is mtime. The value can be a method name in hashlib module such as md5 or sha256.

The initialization method of both classes has four arguments. Unfortunately those arguments do not have default values, which make them difficult to use in other python projects. These 4 arguments are listed below. It seems that only cache_path argument is mandatory.

settings

a dict of settings, a few keys CACHE_PATH, GZIP_CACHE, and CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD are required for the class.

cache_path

the file name to cache.

caching_policy

bool value to decide saving cache.

load_policy

bool value to decide loading cache.

You can derive a class from FileStampDataCacher and add default values for three arguments of __init__ method.

from pelican.cache import FileStampDataCacher

class FileCacher(FileStampDataCacher):
    def __init__(self, cache_name, settings = {
                    'CACHE_PATH': 'cache', 
                    'GZIP_CACHE': True,
                    'CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD': 'mtime' 
                    # or sha256, sha512 
                }, caching_policy=True, load_policy=True):
        super(FileCacher, self).__init__(
            settings, cache_name, caching_policy, load_policy
        )

Here is an exmple to test the derived class.

if __name__ == '__main__':

    cacher = FileCacher('cache_file') # filename of cache
    content = cacher.get_cached_data('./pelican_help.txt')
    print(f'content is {content}')
    if content is None:
        with open('./pelican_help.txt', 'r') as f:
            content = f.read()
        cacher.cache_data('./pelican_help.txt', content)
        cacher.save_cache()

The Pelican documentation cautions the use of cache module. The cache.py file in Pelican 4.2.0 has not been modified since 2015. It may be useful when a website has thousands of pages. I personally do not have a use case for the cache module yet.