Browser Caching Prevents Client-Side Website Updates

[bcbielecki]

As shown below, certain browsers like Chrome cache css and js files instead of GETing the most recent files from the server.
This poses a major issue as we put up weekly updates to the site that students need to see immediately on their end.

An inelegant solution we have is to use a special meta tag on all projects pages OR a query param on the js scripts for the pages with js-based footers and headers. This would force the browser to fetch the newest files, but I think it will require a lot of upkeep for us to maintain long-term as we add more files. It's better than nothing though.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30764510/website-html-doesnt-update-for-users-because-of-cache

[dylanvu]

I am doing some investigation on industry standards here, and this is what someone mentioned: hashing our js files

mkdocs/mkdocs#1979 (comment)

I'm looking to see if we can automate hashing of our js files through our github workflows maybe

[dylanvu]

I think that I will implement some sort of hashing and attach it to our current workflow:
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/what-is-cache-busting-55366b3ac022
https://www.keycdn.com/support/what-is-cache-busting#2-file-path-versioning

[dylanvu]

hashing script seems to have worked