- #CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE INSTALL#
- #CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE UPDATE#
- #CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE MANUAL#
- #CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE DOWNLOAD#
#CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE DOWNLOAD#
In order to speed up web browsing, web browsers are designed to download web pages and store them locally on your computer's hard drive in an area called "cache".
#CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE INSTALL#
You could for example install in your browser of choice and just hit the CSS reload button, which gives you the same effect, though with a bit more overhead since it reloads all CSS.Home > Cache Tell me more about cache What is browser cache? You don’t have to go all the way there though. This has improved my development time immensely.Īt work we have a development web server that tracks local file changes and tells the browser to refresh the updates css files through a websocket. Refreshing the page during development still takes some time though, especially when you, like me, are doing a web application and are working on improving a part of the app that can only be seem after several clicks.įor this case I can recommend making a setup where you can refresh only the css in the browser, not the page itself. There are lots of tools out there that can do this job for you.Ībout busting your cache to get the newest CSS during development I can recommend setting up a development environment where your web server specificly doesn’t send any caching headers on static content. This will give you a much more effective cache control mechanism, assuming that you have already set all static files to be served with a far future expiration date. While this article mentions CSS specificly this method can and should be used for building any static asset of your page. You also avoid busting the cache by having always updated your time stamp on the minified files that are generated on deployment by the build system. Great for running multiple simultaneous versions for split testing. They will just be there and be ready for being linked to by a new version of your html. This way you could for example build and deploy your new versions of static files into the same directory as the ones that are already in production. Most sites have a build step for minification and bundling anyway, just add this into the process. This way the file name become an identifier of both the file and its content at the same time.
#CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE MANUAL#
Version numbering requires manual updates and timestamps only work correctly under the assumption that you are working directly on the affected files, and not going through VCS, deployment scripts etc.Ī better metod is to have a build step that renames the file itself to a hash of its content. While using version numbers or even dates to bust old cached versions of a file, they are really not a good final solution to optimal cache control. And of course, if you don’t change the value for a while, the browser will continue to cache (or preserve) the file, and won’t attempt to download it unless other factors force it to, or you end up updating the query string value.
You could add many types of characters to the query string value, but numbers are a logical way to do it, because then you can just increase the number, and even add decimal places if you want. It will only serve to make the browser think it’s a completely different file. If you’re new to query strings, just know that the part before the equals sign is like a placeholder, and the part after the equals sign is the value put into that placeholder.
#CHROME FORCE REFRESH OF CSS FILE UPDATE#
So, each time you update your CSS on the server, you can incrementally update your version number. The browser will view a file name of style.css as different from a file name of style.css?v=1.1, so it will generally force the browser to update the CSS. But I’ve also added what’s called a query string to the end of the file name. Notice that I’m pointing to my CSS using the commonly known element. So how can you ensure that any updates you’ve made to your CSS will take place immediately for all users? In other words, how do you force the browser to update your CSS? Here’s one way to do it: But it’s unlikely that average web users know what a hard refresh is, nor can you expect them to keep refreshing the page until things straighten out. Sometimes it’s necessary to do a hard refresh to see the updates take effect. If you’re a beginner and you’re developing HTML and CSS using an external stylesheet, you might notice that in some browsers, under some circumstances, the changes you’ve made to your CSS don’t take effect immediately.