How can one ensure that the content fetched using file_get_contents is always up-to-date and not cached?

When using file_get_contents to fetch content from a URL, the content may be cached by default, leading to outdated data being retrieved. To ensure that the content fetched is always up-to-date, you can use the stream_context_create function to create a context with the appropriate options, including disabling caching. 

$url = 'https://example.com/data.json';
$options = [
    'http' => [
        'method' => 'GET',
        'header' => 'Cache-Control: no-cache'
    ]
];
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$data = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

// Use the fetched data as needed
echo $data;

Keywords

file_get_contents caching HTTP headers cache-control expires

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