Overview
While navigating the Portal, you may have noticed that your account is divided into Sites, with multiple scopes potentially under each site. This guide aims to clear up any confusion surrounding those two terms.
Sites
Each Site has it's own delivery hash and base URL, which provides each of them with the ability to function as a stand-alone delivery product, with their own configurations, raw access logs, analytics, and hostnames.
At least one Site is required in order to utilize the CDN. The easiest way to create a new Site is to use our Create Site wizard.
Most commonly, this is used to create multiple delivery environments, separating, for example, video libraries from image thumbnail libraries, or even different websites or games that are published by the same account owner.
Sites can also be created for things such as development and staging environments, getting full CDN delivery support during the testing and integration processes.
In previous versions of StrikeTracker, "Host" was the name used to refer to the delivery containers used to configure, cache, and deliver your content. With StrikeTracker 3.5, "Hosts" are now known as "Sites."
Scopes
Each Site can also have any number of Scopes defined. Scopes are pseudo-directories that correspond with directory paths of your objects, and are created so that configurations can be made to a sub-set of your files.
For example, your CSS files might require different caching behavior than your images. You may want them to expire from cache every 1 hour, while the images should stay in cache for as long as possible. If these files are located in different directories on your Origin, then you can add Scopes for these directories and then create different CDN Caching Policies for each location.
In this example, your CSS file is located at http://www.mydomain.com/styles/file.css, and your images are all in http://www.mydomain.com/images/... You could create new Scopes named:
/styles/
/images/
To add a new Scope, click the Scopes drop-down menu. Then click the add-scope button and appropriately name the new Scope.
Once created, those Scopes will appear in Scopes drop-down at the top of the Site Edit Policies screen. Choosing one of those Scopes from the drop-down will move you to that Scope, and then allow you to add any configurations to just that Scope.
In the example above, you would then add a new CDN Caching Policy configuration with a 1 hour TTL for /styles/, and then switch to the /images/ Scope and add a new CDN Caching Policy with a 1 year TTL.
You may add any number of configurations to a Scope, but you do not have to add them all. Scopes will inherit configuration policies from their parents (and directories above them), so you only need to add new policies for those configurations that you want to explicitly overwrite for that Scope.
Scopes must be a directory, they cannot be files themselves. If you need to apply policies to an individual file you will need to use the Path and extension filters available within that specific policy. Every Site also has a default Scope, labeled “/”.
Adding configuration policies to the “/” Scope will configure all objects for that Site. Generally you will add your policies to “/” first, creating default CDN behavior for the entire Site, and then create Scopes to and new policies in that Scope to override specific behavior such as cache rules or content protection.
Editing a Scope
To edit a Scope, click the Scopes drop-down menu to navigate to the Scope you’d like to edit. By default, Scopes inherit all configuration policies and settings from their parent Scope. You’ll have to uncheck the “Use defaults from parent Scope” box in order to begin making changes.
Once you’ve unlocked a Scope for editing, you’ll be able to make changes to policies inherited from the parent Scope, and add new policies specific to that Scope independent of the parent Scope.