How do I completely disable cache?

Question

Drupal 6's cache can be set to disabled, normal or aggressive. I cannot find these options for my Drupal 7 installation. There is only a button that flushes all the cache but it has to be clicked for every change I made to a module or a template. By change I mean adding some HTML tags to a module or a template.

Thanks to mirzu's response, I already installed the devel module but it doesn't work either. The only way I get so see my changes is by disabling and enabling the module.

The hello.module looks like:

function annotate_menu() {
  $items = array();
  $items['hello'] = array(
    'title'            => t('Hello world'),
    'page callback'    => 'hello_output',
    'access arguments' => array('access content'),
  );

  return $items;
}

function hello_output() {
  header('Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8');
  header('Content-Disposition: inline');
  return 'annotate';
}

The template page-hello.tpl.php contains print $content;.

I access the page through http://localhost/test/hello.

Solution 1

Completely disable the cache and use the devel module and check the box that reads "rebuild the cache registry on each page load."

Solution 2

There are many different levels of caching involved.

• The menu system is not actually a cache. If you change anything in hook_menu(), you need to rebuild it. devel.module provides a handy link for that in the development block.

• Additionally, Drupal also caches hook implementation and many other things, which you can clear with another link in the development block or if you have drush installed, with "drush cc all". There is also a way to disable it completely but that could make your site quite slow: http://drupal.org/node/797346

Comments

[Berdir]

Define "change", what do you want to update exactly?. Some things are cached but generally, you should be able to change the inside of a function for example and it should update. Are you testing as anonymous user and page caching is enabled maybe? Might also help if you post some code..

[jdecuyper]

I did this but it still doesn't refresh anything. Maybe I should completely disable the cache?

[jdecuyper]

Thanks, in the end, I had to switch to Drupal 6 (for other reasons) which allows you to disable the cache functionality (inside the performance section).

[jdecuyper]

+1, thanks for pointing out the different kinds of cache Drupal manages.

[liquidcms]

maybe answer above was for an older version of the Devel module? the latest rel (7.x-1.2) does not have the option to "rebuild the cache registry on each page load".

[Jaime Hablutzel]

why drupal doesn´t have a built it option to disable the cache?

[Eduard Luca]

"rebuild the cache registry on each page load" is actually "rebuild the theme cache registry on each page load", so it's useless.

[mirzu]

@EduardLuca If you are doing theming it's quite useful.

[Toaster]

This disable cache option didn't show in my devel UI. One can always edit drupal's settings.php file as per drupal.org/node/797346

[Ryaner]

As of 7.x-1.3 its now called rebuild the theme cache.