Vercel CDN now honors Cache-Control from external origins by default

Starting April 6, Vercel will reflect the cache policy of responses proxied to external origins by default for new projects. Previously, when serving external origins via rewrites, the default was no caching, and x-vercel-enable-rewrite-caching in vercel.json had to be turned on separately.

Now Vercel CDN caches according to the upstream's Cache-Control, CDN-Cache-Control, and Vercel-CDN-Cache-Control headers. If the external origin sends Vercel-Cache-Tag, cache purging is also possible via Cache Tags.

The changes are as follows.

• New projects cache external origin responses by default.
• Existing projects can opt in to the new behavior from the project dashboard.
• Specific paths can disable caching with x-vercel-enable-rewrite-caching: 0.

If you don't want caching while proxying external origins in a new project, you should check the upstream cache headers before creation to align them with your intended strategy. Routing settings can be adjusted in the Rewrites to External Origins documentation and the CDN tab in project settings.