Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Web design foundations
Lecture: Cache busting: Introduction
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0:02
Let's talk about stale static files. Remember when we talked about Pyramid and the static folder - its whole purpose is to cache things,
0:11
and make sure that our page loads as fast as possible. But when we are trying to develop the site or deploy new versions of the site,
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this can be problematic. So imagine, we've started out with this CSS file in the very standard black text on the white background.
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So here our body has the color black and the background of white, and it looks like this- that's pretty decent,
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you can see the white background and the black text. Maybe we decide for some reason we want to change the styles,
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or like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could make like a dark version where the font is white and the color is very dark grey or something like that?
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And we either edit this and try to load it for ourselves or we push it to production and visitors who have been there before
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and previously cached the original site.css, come back and when they view the page, it still looks the same
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or when we are developing it and we view the page, it still looks the same and this is totally frustrating,
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I want you to wear two hats when you think about this problem - on one hand, it's annoying for you as a developer constantly changing your site
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that these styles don't change and adapt with you, this is true for images, this is true for JavaScript and it’s also true for style sheets.
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I suspect it's probably the worst for JavaScript, because there is no visual confirmation that something is happening or changing
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or you have the fresh version when you are working with JavaScript, but you have the problem across all these static resources.
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Now, there are ways that you can tweak your browser, say if you turn on the developer tools and say: "While I'm in developer tool mode
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don't cache this." But think about it from the perspective of deployment as well,
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there is no way you can go to all the users and go have you been here before, you might need to force refresh your browser
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so you can see the new site and if you don't, it's going to look like crap, so I am going to show you a really simple technique
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that will solve this problem 100% of the time. You'll get maximum cache value,
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you could set the cache duration to like a year or two years or ten years, it wouldn't matter, the second you deploy a new version,
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if there is a change, users will download it, there is no change, they'll use the cached version. Similarly for you while you are developing it.
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So, this may seem like it's a little bit of an advanced topic, getting in the head of just basic styling box model layout and so on,
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but I wanted to put this first, so that we don't worry about these problems again like I'm so over dealing with "Oh is that thing fresh,
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do I have the latest version?" You'll see it's super easy to solve this problem
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and if we tackle it now, we won't have to worry about it for the entire rest of the class.