Cache

• Introduction
• Configuration
  • Driver Prerequisites
• Cache Usage
  • Obtaining A Cache Instance
  • Retrieving Items From The Cache
  • Storing Items In The Cache
  • Removing Items From The Cache
  • The Cache Helper
• Cache Tags
  • Storing Tagged Cache Items
  • Accessing Tagged Cache Items
  • Removing Tagged Cache Items
• Atomic Locks
  • Driver Prerequisites
  • Managing Locks
  • Managing Locks Across Processes
• Adding Custom Cache Drivers
  • Writing The Driver
  • Registering The Driver
• Events

Introduction

Some of the data retrieval or processing tasks performed by your application could be CPU intensive or take several seconds to complete. When this is the case, it is common to cache the retrieved data for a time so it can be retrieved quickly on subsequent requests for the same data. The cached data is usually stored in a very fast data store such as Memcached or Redis.

Thankfully, Laravel provides an expressive, unified API for various cache backends, allowing you to take advantage of their blazing fast data retrieval and speed up your web application.

Configuration

Your application's cache configuration file is located at config/cache.php. In this file, you may specify which cache driver you would like to be used by default throughout your application. Laravel supports popular caching backends like Memcached, Redis, DynamoDB, and relational databases out of the box. In addition, a file based cache driver is available, while array and "null" cache drivers provide convenient cache backends for your automated tests.

The cache configuration file also contains various other options, which are documented within the file, so make sure to read over these options. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores the serialized, cached objects on the server's filesystem. For larger applications, it is recommended that you use a more robust driver such as Memcached or Redis. You may even configure multiple cache configurations for the same driver.

Driver Prerequisites

Database

When using the database cache driver, you will need to setup a table to contain the cache items. You'll find an example Schema declaration for the table below:

1Schema::create('cache', function ($table) {
2    $table->string('key')->unique();
3    $table->text('value');
4    $table->integer('expiration');
5});