Boost is a contributed module that provides static page caching for Drupal websites. It can help you realize a significant performance increase for personal blogs, small business, corporate sites, portals and directories that receive mostly anonymous traffic. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance and enhancing your website visitor's experience.

For previous versions of Boost, see the Drupal 6.x Boost handbook.

Features

  • Improves website performance for anonymous users.
  • On-Demand page caching.
  • Supports shared, VPS and dedicated hosting.
  • Supports and designed for Apache.
  • Nginx and IIS semi-supported.
  • Supports Multi-site Installations.
  • Supports HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON/AJAX.
  • Built-in htaccess file generator if needed.
  • Page cache status/flush block. See: #1448476: Admin status block in 7.x-1.x
  • Gzip page compression. (partial, see: #1416214: Basic gzip support for 7x)
  • Adjustable cache lifetimes.
  • Uses cron run to trigger cleaning of cached files.
  • Choose which pages are cached.
  • Injects HTML comment to provide easy verification of Boost.
  • Easy to install and setup.

Not yet implemented in Drupal 7.x-1.x port, not tested or need to document the alternative:

  • Supports sub-directory Installations. (not tested)
  • Lighttpd. (not tested, howto required)
  • Page cache configuration block for easy, on-the-fly tuning. (not implemented, open a feature request issue if you would like this)
  • Ajax core statistics block. (not implemented, see: #1370824: Stats Block)

Deprecated in Drupal 7.x-1.x:

  • Built in crawler to automatically regenerate cached files: evaluate other crawling modules, document. -- as of 7.x-1.0-beta2, there is an experimental crawler in a submodule which can automatically recrawl a page when it expires. Depends on the Cache Expiration module and HTTP Parallel Request & Threading Library.

Requirements:

  • Drupal's clean URLs MUST be enabled and working properly.

Recommended modules:

  • Expire, to clear the Boost cache when new content is published
  • httprl, to automatically refresh expired pages, when using the boost_crawler submodule
  • Global Redirect, removes trailing / from URLs, avoids having duplicate pages (and cache) for node/123 and /your/cleanurl
  • Pathauto, set custom path or URL for all types of content. (Pathauto Handbook)
  • Token, required by Pathauto, provides token support to enhance paths. (Token Handbook)
  • Transliteration, removes spaces and other high-ASCII/Unicode characters from filenames of uploaded files.

Support

Project issue queue:
http://drupal.org/project/issues/boost

Please take the time to review other support issues before posting a new one. It can be hard to debug boost support issues without access to the server. Provide as much information as possible in order to reproduce the issue.

Feel free to post install tips in the installation handbook page.

Paid support is possible by contacting the module maintainers via their
user contact page (see below). We also accept donations (PayPal: mikeytown2, bgm).

Credits:

4.7 Originally developed by Arto Bendiken
5.x Port by Alexander I. Grafov.
5.x Developed & Maintained by no one at this time. #454652: Looking for a co-maintainer - 5.x
6.x Port by Ben Lavender.
6.x Developed & Maintained by Mike Carper. Since 2012, minimal maintenance by Mathieu Lutfy.
7.x Port by Mike Carper
7.x Developed & Maintained by Mike Carper (mikeytown2) and Mathieu Lutfy (bgm).

Additional contributions by Jacob Peddicord, Justin Miller, Barry Jaspan.

Since the git migration, most patches are committed with the author information. You can view more information in the page about Committers for Boost.

Further reading