How about the purge module then?

The purge module has been created for this very purpose yet isn't currently designed with the Acquia platform in mind and makes it therefore difficult to setup purging. While the purge module contributor and I work together to improve version 2.x of Purge this module serves as the go-to point for the interim. This module will get a dependency on purge and become its plugin in the future.

Installation

Installing the project is fairly simple, just download the project as any other Drupal.org project and enable it on whichever environment you are. Please *note* that the module only works when using your site on Acquia Cloud and stays silent and harmless elsewhere. By default the cache purging notifications are enabled allowing you to immediately test the purging when enabled. You will also need to install the expire module.

Maximizing the effects of proactive purging

When you install this module together with the expire module about 90% of all changing objects within your site are detected, such as nodes, taxonomy tags and menu items. Although the expire module does a hard job on detecting everything in your site it might not always be aware of your site specific features like news sections or dynamic blocks on your front page.

A couple of examples you could run into:

• Nodes of type news get purged yet the paged view on /news is missed. You would probably also like to purge the first few sub pages, e.g.: /news?page=1, /news?page=2, /news?page=3
• You have job descriptions in a tagcloud on your front page ("") and whenever new taxonomy tags are added to the jobs vocabulary the front page is not purged because the expire module doesn't detect it for you.
• Whenever a new user account is added to Drupal the "about our team" page on "team" is not being refreshed.

These scenarios are examples of the remaining 10% of things that can't be auto detected with the expire module and for those custom needs the Acquia Purge module comes with rules integration built in. By defining a standard rule that listens to the event you need - for instance changing content of type X - you can fire the "Purge a path from Varnish on Acquia Cloud" action on paths like "news" and "news?page=1". By enabling the on-screen logging facility you can quickly test your rules or rely on your log files.

Once it works and runs in production

With Varnish load balancing your site and proactive purging in place you can start increasing the "Minimum cache lifetime" and "Expiration of cached pages" values. For instance by putting these settings to a couple of hours or even a day your web servers will only work for authenticated traffic and pages that have just been purged and thus increases the effective usage of what your platform provides significantly.

API level integration

In case you need code level integration for some reason we either advise you to contribute to the expire module or if your needs are very site specific, to leverage the API functions that Acquia Purge exposes. If you need it you can send your path or list of paths to these helper functions:

• acquia_purge_purge_path ($path, $domains = NULL)
• acquia_purge_purge_paths ($paths, $domains = NULL)
• acquia_purge_purge_node (&$node, $domains = NULL)