Distribution Configurations Management

You can create distribution by following the steps explained in the Create Your First Distribution section. 

To manage your created distributions; follow the steps outlined below: 

Log in to MerlinCDN Management panel. 

In the left navigation sidebar click Distributions. Select your distribution you want to configure

Tip: If there are multiple distributions, use the search box to find them by name.

Clicking on a distribution name expands the settings section where you can manage general settings,  policies, configure and customize MerlinCDN behaviors based on your requirements.

Configuration

This section helps to manage the basic configurations for an entire distribution depending on the distribution type. These are the configurable options that you can select to use as default or customize when creating and updating a distribution.

Static and Dynamic Distributions have some values that are explained below. Depending on whether the distribution type is Static or Dynamic, there are exclusive configuration settings you can apply.

Always use https: This option can take a Yes or No value.

• • If enabled with Yes, MerlinCDN requires end users/visitors to use https when accessing your files in your MerlinCDN distributions. Visitors can access your files only if they are using HTTPS. If a visitor sends an HTTP request instead of an HTTPS request, MerlinCDN returns the HTTP status code 403 (Forbidden) and does not return the file.
  • If set as No; MerlinCDN serves files in your distributions either HTTP or HTTPS to your end-users/visitors depending on client requests.

Fallback cache TTL: This option can take duration values.

• • This option indicates the cache duration if there are no cache headers are available on the files requested from the origin server(s). You can specify cache policies under cache settings.
  • Default Fallback Cache TTL is 24hours for Static distributions and 5 minutes for Dynamic distributions.
  • You can configure Fallback cache TTL by choosing from the dropdown list or setting custom duration in minutes or hours.
  • Consider setting shorter durations for Dynamic distributions where the content might change frequently as caching them for a long time might result in delivering the old content from cache even if the actual content is updated in the origin.

Clicking on Custom will add the Custom Value row to your configuration screen.  

Gzip: This option can take a Yes or No value.

• • gzip is a single-file/stream lossless data compression utility, where the resulting compressed file generally has the suffix .gz. GZIP also refers to the associated compressed data format used by the utility.
  • You might already be using GZIP in your origin server(s) as it provides an efficient way to reduce the size of the data that is transferred in end-to-end communications between your origin, MerlinCDN, and end-users.
  • If you do not have GZIP enabled for your content in your origin, you can configure your MerlinCDN distribution to compress your files with GZIP by enabling with Yes.

Minimum Transport Layer Security (TLS) version: Some older TLS versions might be considered as by SSL authorities. However, some older operating clients/devices like Android 4.0 to 4.2 can only work with old TLS versions.

• • Currently, there are 2 options on MerlinCDN from which you can select.
    
    • TLSv.1.1
    • TLSv.1.2 
  • If your distributions must be available to older devices, select the older version.
  • If higher SSL security is important for your distribution, select the higher version by acknowledging that your MerlinCDN distribution might not be available to some old devices.

Html & CSS & JS Minify: This option can take a Yes or No value.

• • If enabled with Yes; MerlinCDN will minify the contents of your distribution on-the-fly to reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JS files.
  • Please take into consideration that enabling Minify option may cause some technical drawbacks due to the software implementation of the corresponding distribution.

Merge Slashes: This option can take a Yes or No value.

• • If enabled, it merges multiple consecutive slashes into a single one in the URLs. 
  • When it is selected as Yes, example.com/images/img.png and example.com/images//img.png are treated as the same.