Serving Static Content NGINX - caching

Question

I'm new to NGINX. I don't know a lot about it yet, but I'm trying to.
I'm curious what is the best way to serve the static contents from my page using NGINX. The main reason why I want to serve the static contents is that I want put less load on my application servers, and increase the page load speed.
I came across
a couple good articles that help me put these together this post : here, here, here, and here.
But everything is still a little clear.
Configuration
File Path : etc/nginx/default
server {
listen 80 default_server;
server_name default;
root /home/forge/site/public;
location / {
proxy_pass http://43.35.49.160/;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
# Media: images, icons, video, audio, HTC
location ~* \.(?:jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|cur|gz|svg|svgz|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm|htc)$ {
expires 1M;
access_log off;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
}
# CSS and Javascript
location ~* \.(?:css|js)$ {
expires 1y;
access_log off;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
}
}
Test/Result
After saving my file, I run service nginx reload.
Next, I tried run : curl -X GET -I http://45.33.69.160/index.php
I got:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.6.3
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 15:14:55 GMT
Set-Cookie: XSRF-TOKEN=eyJpdiI6IkhPa2kwK1wvd2kxMFV0TURzYnMwSXFnPT0iLCJ2YWx1ZSI6IkFpSFpvakNjcGp0b0RWcVViYXJcLzRHbmo3XC9qbStYc2VzYVh4ZHVwNW45UGNQMmltZEhvSys1NjhZVzZmckhzOGRBUk5IU1pGK084VDF1ZmhvVkZ4MlE9PSIsIm1hYyI6IjliMzc5NWQ4MWRiMjM1NzUxNjcyNGNmYWUzMGQyMDk3MjlkYTdhYzgxYTI0OGViODhlMTRjZTI4MWE5MDU2MGYifQ%3D%3D; expires=Fri, 08-May-2015 17:14:55 GMT; Max-Age=7200; path=/
Set-Cookie: laravel_session=eyJpdiI6Iklhb041MkVBak0rVm5JeUZ0VVwvZ3pnPT0iLCJ2YWx1ZSI6IitRUFlzQzNmSm1FZ0NQVVFtaTJ4cG1hODlDa2NjVDgzdXBcLzRcL0ZSM1ZPOTRvRGo5QjQ1REluTUM3Vjd3cFptV3dWdHJweTY3QW5QR2lwTkZMUlNqbnc9PSIsIm1hYyI6IjIxOTZkYzM5ODE0N2E4YmQzODMxZGYzMDY3NjI4ODM1YWQxNGMxNDRlZDZmMGE1M2IwZWY2OTU4ZmVjOTIyMjkifQ%3D%3D; expires=Fri, 08-May-2015 17:14:55 GMT; Max-Age=7200; path=/; httponly
Then, I tried run curl -X GET -I http://45.33.69.160/css/custom.css
I got :
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.6.3
Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 15:16:03 GMT
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Length: 2890
Last-Modified: Thu, 07 May 2015 03:02:38 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "554ad5ce-b4a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Why do I see Cache-Control: no-cache and I just set up the cache ?
Everything is just unclear to me right now.
Questions
Can someone please make it clear on how to :
configure this properly
test that configuration if it is work
see the different between caching and not caching
benchmark it and print out that report on a page or CLI
?

Answer 1

Cache-Control: no-cache
As said in this answer about no-cache, which links to the spec, the Cache-Control: no-cache should tell the user agent and in-between caches which caching style to use (namely to revalidate each time with the server). This applies if you use nginx exclusively. If you use it as a pass-through, you need to set proxy_ignore_headers, like
proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control;
Config
Apart from that: in the NGINX reference about content caching, it says to put the line
proxy_cache_path /data/nginx/cache keys_zone=one:10m;
in the http part, followed by
proxy_cache one;
in the server part.
Testing
In this SF question, it says to test caching behavior by adding the X-Cache-Status header via the config file
add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status;
Its answer states that
You can view headers with
the Firefox addon firebug
the Chrome debugging console
cURL (curl -I )