Remove the cache for a particular Twig file

Question

I'm showing the name of the currently logged-in user in header, using \Drupal::currentUser()->getUsername(), but it's showing an already cached page. I know I can disable the cache for a particular page using \Drupal::service('page_cache_kill_switch')->trigger(), but this won't work with the header.html.twig file.

How can I achieve it without affecting the performance?

Answer 1

You need a cache context and a cache tag of the user:

$variables['username'] = [
  '#markup' => \Drupal::currentUser()->getUsername(),
  '#cache' => [
    'contexts' => [
      'user',
    ],
    'tags' => [
      'user:' . \Drupal::currentUser()->id(),
    ],
  ],
];

You can add this directly in a preprocess hook, but then the rendered output will vary for each user. For large numbers of users you might want to put this in a lazy builder callback, which will then match the auto-placeholder conditions and can be lazy-loaded through BigPipe without affecting page load performance.

See https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/api/render-api/auto-placeholdering