How to set HTTP headers (for cache-control)?

As I wrote is best to use the file .htaccess. However beware of the time you leave the contents in the cache.

Use:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>

Where: 604800 = 7 days

PS: This can be used to reset any header

To use cache-control in HTML, you use the meta tag, e.g.

<meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="public">

The value in the content field is defined as one of the four values below.

Some information on the Cache-Control header is as follows

HTTP 1.1. Allowed values = PUBLIC | PRIVATE | NO-CACHE | NO-STORE.

Public - may be cached in public shared caches.
Private - may only be cached in private cache.
No-Cache - may not be cached.
No-Store - may be cached but not archived.

The directive CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE indicates cached information should not be used and instead requests should be forwarded to the origin server. This directive has the same semantics as the PRAGMA:NO-CACHE.

Clients SHOULD include both PRAGMA: NO-CACHE and CACHE-CONTROL: NO-CACHE when a no-cache request is sent to a server not known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. Also see EXPIRES.

Note: It may be better to specify cache commands in HTTP than in META statements, where they can influence more than the browser, but proxies and other intermediaries that may cache information.

You can set the headers in PHP by using:

<?php
  //set headers to NOT cache a page
  header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); //HTTP 1.1
  header("Pragma: no-cache"); //HTTP 1.0
  header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Date in the past

  //or, if you DO want a file to cache, use:
  header("Cache-Control: max-age=2592000"); //30days (60sec * 60min * 24hours * 30days)

?>

Note that the exact headers used will depend on your needs (and if you need to support HTTP 1.0 and/or HTTP 1.1)