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POHow to force browser to reload cached CSS/JS files?
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  1. POHow to force browser to reload cached CSS/JS files?
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    copied!<p>I have noticed that some browsers (in particular, Firefox and Opera) are very zealous in using cached copies of <strong>.css</strong> and <strong>.js</strong> files, even between browser sessions. This leads to a problem when you update one of these files but the user's browser keeps on using the cached copy.</p> <p>The question is: what is the most elegant way of forcing the user's browser to reload the file when it has changed?</p> <p>Ideally the solution would not force the browser to reload the file on every visit to the page. I will post my own solution as an answer, but I am curious if anyone has a better solution and I'll let your votes decide.</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong></p> <p>After allowing discussion here for a while, I have found <strong>John Millikin</strong> and <strong>da5id</strong>'s suggestion to be useful. It turns out there is a term for this: <strong>auto-versioning</strong>.</p> <p>I have posted a new answer below which is a combination of my original solution and John's suggestion.</p> <p>Another idea which was suggested by <strong>SCdF</strong> would be to append a bogus query string to the file. (Some Python code to automatically use the timestamp as a bogus query string was submitted by <strong>pi</strong>.). However, there is some discussion as to whether or not the browser would cache a file with a query string. (Remember, we want the browser to cache the file and use it on future visits. We only want it to fetch the file again when it has changed.)</p> <p>Since it is not clear what happens with a bogus query string, I am not accepting that answer.</p>
 

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