We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
- ID
- 27265
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 22 Sep 2026, 10:04 PM
- Fetched
- 22 Sep 2026, 11:43 PM
- Provider
- Cloudflare Blog
- Category
- infrastructure
- Original URL
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/vary-support/
- Source URL
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 22 Sep 2026, 11:44 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Cloudflare shipped Vary header support in Cache Rules across all plans, letting customers control how the CDN handles HTTP Vary instead of relying on raw header values. You can normalize known negotiation headers (like Accept or Accept-Encoding), pass exact values through when fine distinctions matter, or bypass cache entirely when variation is too unpredictable.
Why it matters
If you serve multiple representations from one URL (e.g., HTML vs JSON by Accept header, or different image formats) behind Cloudflare, you should review your Cache Rules now — previously a naive Vary could either serve wrong content or fragment your cache into thousands of near-duplicate entries. Configuring normalization lets you keep cache hit rates high without breaking content negotiation.
Discussion angle
Walk through a concrete Cache Rules config for a site that serves both HTML and JSON from the same path via Accept header — show how Vary normalization changes cache hit rate versus raw header passthrough.