Cache-busting static assets

Yii 2.0 General Discussions
1

I’d like to know what people who use external asset build tools (grunt etc. rather than Asset Manager) do for cache-busting. To start the discussion, here’s my new scheme. It’s not very DRY but it should work.

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[*]Grunt builds js and css files.

[]The web server sets a distant Expires value for ".js" and "*.css" files.

[*]In app root, a file "constants.php" contains YII_DEBUG etc. that the entry scripts include.

[*]“constants.php” also declares my app’s CACHE_BUSTER global const.

[*]When grunt runs, it updates “constants.php” changing the value of CACHE_BUSTER to the current git short hash, e.g. [font=“Courier New”]define(‘CACHE_BUSTER’, ‘8a522dc’)[/font].

[*]Grunt uses the same value in the name of the asset files it makes, e.g. "script.8a522dc.js".

[*]The layout views use CACHE_BUSTER in the URLs to the static files, e.g. "/js/script.8a522dc.js".

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What does everyone else do? Do you have a critique of this plan?

And is there anything Yii could do to be more helpful in solving this problem?

2

I’m just appending filemtime of what grunt generated to the URL i.e. /js/all.js?v=13949213490

So in order to bust cache I’m re-running grunt and that’s it.

3

How does the mtime get into the URL? Does the layout view read it from the filesystem?

4

And why it’s better to change the filename over using a query string.

5

Yes, layout uses custom component which reads mtime from file system. Using query string isn’t better. It just works well for us.

6

The CACHE_BUSTER constant in my scheme is to avoid the filesystem access every time a layout is used.

7

Yes, I understand that. Your schema looks OK to me.