Caching Symfony 2 on Nginx - symfony

Question

I moved from the setup of Apache 2 + Varnish to Nginx alone, and I'm kinda stuck with how I should setup/use ESI as well as fastcgi_cache in this setup.
First of all, the idea of ESI was that we setup a reverse proxy layer in front of the server to cache the cache-able parts of a page, then using esi to retrieve the dynamic parts. In my previous setup Varnish was acting as the reverse proxy and Apache only handles the esi requests when necessary.
My question is that now with Nginx acting as the sole server here, how do I make it to work? Do I need to setup another Nginx instance running as a reverse proxy server or something? I couldn't find any document on this.
The second question is regarding fastcgi_cache. I have set it up as described below but the cache does't seem to work for me, no cache file populated and I always get "MISS". I wonder if it's because I need to set max-age/shared-max-age in each controller for each to work?
fastcgi_cache_path /run levels=1:2 keys_zone=www_mysite_com:100m inactive=60m;
fastcgi_cache_key "$scheme$request_method$host$request_uri";
fastcgi_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header http_500;
server {
#listen 80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
#listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
root /var/www/mysite.com/w/w/w/www/web;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
# Make site accessible from http://www.mysite.com
server_name www.mysite.com;
# Specify a character set
charset utf-8;
# strip app.php/ prefix if it is present
rewrite ^/app\.php/?(.*)$ /$1 permanent;
# h5bp nginx configs
# include conf/h5bp.conf;
location / {
index app.php;
try_files $uri #rewriteapp;
}
location #rewriteapp {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /app.php/$1 last;
}
# Deny access to .htaccess
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
# Don't log robots.txt or favicon.ico files
location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
# 404 errors handled by our application, for instance Symfony
error_page 404 /app.php;
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server from upstream phpfcgi
location ~ ^/(app|app_dev|backend/app|backend/app_dev|config)\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
# With php5-fpm:
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME web/$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param HTTPS off;
fastcgi_cache www_mysite_com;
fastcgi_cache_valid 200 60m;
}
# Only for nginx-naxsi : process denied requests
#location /RequestDenied {
# For example, return an error code
#return 418;
#}
# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
#error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
}

Answer 1

By default, responses from the Symfony 2 application have a cache control header that disables caching:
Cache-Control: no-cache
If you would like nginx to cache pages you will have to change those headers.
You can find general information about caching in the documentation
The simplest solution is to use the SymfonyFrameworkExtraBundle (you already have it if you use the SF2 standard edition) and use annotations on your controllers and/or actions to specify the cache headers. You can find more info about this approach it the docs for the #Cache annotation.