Stop Chrome Caching My JS Files

Question

I will make a change to my JS files but it won't really change in the browser, I have to rename the files every time so that it reloads it. Is there some sort of .htaccess command I can add or something to make it stop caching?

It is even caching my html pages hard core. I need to reopen my entire browser just to see changes. Could it possibly be a server problem?

Answer 1

A few ideas:

1. When you refresh your page in Chrome, do a CTRL+F5 to do a full refresh.
2. Even if you set the expires to 0, it will still cache during the session. You'll have to close and re-open your browser again.
3. Make sure when you save the files on the server, the timestamps are getting updated. Chrome will first issue a HEAD command instead of a full GET to see if it needs to download the full file again, and the server uses the timestamp to see.

If you want to disable caching on your server, you can do something like:

Header set Expires "Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GM"
Header set Cache-Control "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"

In .htaccess

Answer 2

add Something like script.js?a=[random Number] with the Random number generated by PHP.

Have you tried expire=0, the pragma "no-cache" and "cache-control=NO-CACHE"? (I dunno what they say about Scripts).

Answer 3

When doing updates to my web applications I will either use a handler to return a single JS file to avoid the massive hits on my server, or add a small query string to them:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/mine/myscript?20111205"></script>

Answer 4

I know this is an "old" question. But the headaches with caching never are. After heaps of trial and errors, I found that one of our web hosting providers had through CPanel this app called Cachewall. I just clicked on Enable Development mode and... voilà!!! It stopped the long suffered pain straight away :) Hope this helps somebody else... R

Answer 5

Quick steps:

1) Open up the Developer Tools dashboard by going to the Chrome Menu -> Tools -> Developer Tools

2) Click on the settings icon on the right hand side (it's a cog!)

3) Check the box "Disable cache (when DevTools is open)"

4) Now, while the dashboard is up, just hit refresh and JS won't be cached!

Answer 6

1. Open Developer Tools

   • Either F12
   • Or ... -> More Tools -> Developer Tools

2. Click Empty Cache and Hard Reload

   • Either right-click refresh icon (just left to url address bar)
   • Or left-click refresh icon and holding it for 1 second