Making coding changes and reloading locally hosted web pages over and over again is a pattern familiar web developers world wide. Another familiar pattern is to constantly wonder if your changes are caching in the browser and not being properly reflected in what you are seeing.
Fear not…there is a very easy fix for this and it doesn’t involve using the browsers empty cache options every single time between page reloads. Simply tell your local web server to send the browser a “no-cache” pragma directive in the HTTP header and then you should be good-to-go.
Once you make this change every web page you serve locally will automatically refresh, every single time. Here’s what the W3C has to say about no-cache headers:
When the no-cache directive is present in a request message, an application SHOULD forward the request toward the origin server even if it has a cached copy of what is being requested.
Make the change in Apache. Here’s how you make the change in your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file on the latest Mac OS running 10.8+. Depending on how your machine is set up you can run the command “sudo pico httpd.conf” then enter your admin password and use the short cuts listed at the button of the pico window or use the ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons on your keyboard to navigate around the file. Typically, the following text is pasted below any other ‘filesMatch’ tags that may reside in the configuration file. Once you are done be sure to restart apache. On Mavericks the command is “sudo apachectl start”:
<filesMatch "\.(html|htm|js|css)$">
FileETag None
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT"
</ifModule>
</filesMatch>
Make the change on IIS 7. If you want to make the change on Windows 7, Windows 2008/2008R2 or Vista then here is a link to Microsoft Technet. If you are using IIS Manager, in Step 4 choose the expire immediately options. Or, if you are using the command line copy this line and run it:
<b>appcmd set config /section:staticContent /clientCache.cacheControlMode:DisableCache</b>
If you have some other operating system version hopefully you get the idea from the suggestions above and apply similar changes for your system.
Optimizing your own public web server cache settings. One last note, the no-cache header setting is typically only used in a development environment. To get the best page performance for your visitors you should allow some browser caching. If you want to learn more about optimizing browser caching here is a good article.
References
Optimizing Headers (Google)
RFC 2616, Section 14 Header Field Definitions
Configure HTTP Expires Response Header (IIS 7)
Manipulating HTTP headers with htaccess (you can make the same no-cache header change in httpd.conf in Mavericks)