Laravel development on remote server experiences CSS/JavaScript change delays - php

I develop on a remote server. I'm not sure if this is a laravel caching tendancy, but CSS and JavaScript changes tend to be delayed longer than usual. I can make instant HTML and php changes, but sometimes it takes more than a few minutes for CSS and JavaScript changes to be reflected on a page. I do know that .blade.php files are generated and cached within an app/storage/views folder, but even when I delete those the changes are not reflected right away.
I have tried on Chrome and Firefox.
Any ideas? Thanks!

CSS and Javascript are not handled by Laravel.
You can check it from the .htaccess of the public folder
Most likely you are hitting the cache browser. One solution to avoid browser cache is to append to the css or javascript a unique identifier whenever there is a new release, e.g.:
site/my/css.css?12345
^
|
+ - Change this to force a fresh copy

What ended up working best was to clear the cached views on the server, as #dynamic hinted at (Laravel and Blade store these cached files).
AS WELL, to close the tab completely and re-access the webpage fresh. There were cases where it was still cached, and so I would just switch to another browser.

Related

My page doesnt load new styles, after I changed them

I'm having a problem inside wordpress custom-theme, where I enqueued style, but it doesn't seem to work without linking it in the index.php , when I edit the css I have to shift+f5 to see the changes, basically clearing the browser cache. My question is if there is any way to do this automatically.
Oh and also I forgot to mention, that I'm using WinSCP for reaching the FTP server of my wordpress website.
I tried to do the auto-clear cache using php, but with many attempts it didn't do anything or even better, prevented me from manually clearing the cache.
What I'm hoping for is 2 things: 1. My enqueued styles would work without linking them in html
2. The automatic clear-cache upon updating code using php
TL;DR Use Shift-F5 liberally when developing css, and disable any caching plugins on your site when developing anything.
Shift-F5 clears your browser cache. That cache holds objects like your css files, so your users' browsers don't have to download them again as they navigate from page to page on your site, or even when they return to your site later. That means css files are sticky. Using shift-F5 while working on your css is an inherent part of web development. There's no reliable way to clear css objects automatically.
Your sample code clears the server-side caches provided by a couple of caching plugins. Avoid that. Instead disable that kind of cache while hammering out your css.
WP_CACHE prevents the use of WordPress's persistent object cache, which handles entirely different kinds of data than CSS. It needs to be defined in wp-config.php to be useful, due to the arcane way persistent object caches are implemented (via an early-loading "drop-in" module). If the words "persistent object cache" don't mean anything to you, don't do anything with WP_CACHE.
Finally, your header() calls put headers on the HTML page you're generating, not not your css, javascript, or media objects. So, they're not useful for preventing browsers from caching your css.
In a typical WordPress / php / apache web server site, WordPress never touches the content of css: the browser requests those files directly from the web server. Some caching plugins adjust the caching headers on css, javascript and media. They do that by inserting web server directives into your site's .htaccess file. Disabling those plugins during css development helps avoid caching confusion.
Your browser devtools Network tab tells you which objects the browser retrieved from cache. It's super helpful when developing with cacheable objects.

When coding HTML, browser doesn't always detect changes

When I'm coding HTML and CSS and load the page in the browser to check changes, sometimes it doesn't update for a while. This obviously causes problems with incremental changes where it's hard to tell if it's changed to suit my latest change or not.
I was wondering if there was a way around this? Possibly a browser (or mode) which is especially for this situation that doesn't have this behaviour?
Try Ctrl+F5 on Windows or Cmd+Shift+R on OSX, this will avoid your browser reading its cache when loading the page (at least when it's Chrome or Firefox)
You could try deleting your browser cache and reloading the page.
In case of CSS I also found sometimes I will need to load the CSS file separately in my browser and refresh it to update.
Sounds like your browser cache, you can test this by clearing it or doing a "hard refresh" to confirm.
You will need to throw some no cache headers if you want to stop this permanently, you can do this from the web server or server-side code depending on your setup (see How to control web page caching, across all browsers?)
On windows refresh with CTRL + F5. The browser will not show from cache. Also in developer tools you can tell it not load from cache
It is mostly because of browser cache.
Just a suggestion(You may find it useful, As an addition to other answers):
If you are on chrome then there is an option to disable cache while the dev toolbar is open. It works for me to ensure there is no caching while I am developing. (I keep my dev toolbar open all the time while developing so it works for me), Here is the screen shot.
Quote from chrome dev tools (https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/settings)
General
Disable cache Will prevent the caching of resources ONLY for pages
which have DevTools open. This will not disable caching if the
DevTools are closed
.
Hmm could be a web server setting, caching request to your same resource. I used to see that a lot on tomcat with JSP. With tomcat we used to delete compiled classes ('work' folder), though, in your case with PHP you may check your server cache settings (files/sessions).
Example: "A typical web server, such as Apache, uses the time of file modification to inform a web browser of a requested page’s age, allowing the browser to take appropriate caching action. With dynamic web pages, the actual PHP script may change only occasionally; meanwhile, the content it displays, which is often fetched from a database, will change frequently."
Source : http://www.sitepoint.com/caching-php-performance/
Another workaround would be to touch (add a space and save) your PHP file when you want it to reload.

Development phase: php keeps displaying images that have been deleted

I am in the development phase of my project. I am using WAMP, Dreamweaver, and IE9. Recently I changed the color of one of the image in my source folder. The problem is that when calling a php page via WAMP the image displayed is the old one (which does not exist anymore(?)) not the new one. It only happens with php pages. It works fine with html pages.
So I believe the problem is not coming from Dreamweaver or IE9. It comes from WAMP. Looks like my old image is saved somewhere (but where?) and for some strange reasons WAMP is loading it instead of the new image.
Has anyone of you met this problem before? How to solve that? Thanks.
Websites will store images in cache once it has loaded it from your website. This is to avoid redownloading a file that hasn't changed. Sometimes, however, the files have changed and the browser is still serving the cached version. There are a few ways to get rid of this.
Clear your cache
Set you browser to not cache images
Some browsers will offer "private browsing". Not only will this not store things like cookies and history, but it will also not cache images. At least, it will only cache them until the private browsing window is closed.
Add a querystring to any file you want to serve with a timestamp like <link href="styles.css?version=213948183214 />. This is typically for development purposes, though. You wouldn't want to do this in production unless it is essential.
Some browsers offer a "hard-refresh" like Chrome and Firefox. If you hold shift while reloading, it will refresh all served files with a fresh version.
Open the page in a new browser

Can nginx serve up files cached by PHP?

As part of a new CMS that I'm planning, I'm going to be caching the HTML output of some "static" content. I say "static" because no content stored in a database is really static, but it's close enough. The system will MD5 hash the request URL and save a minified version of the HTML output in a cache folder. The next time the page is requested, the CMS will check if a cached version exists, then it'll check the age of the file and then serve up the cached version, thus saving a lot of resources (especially when it comes to DB calls).
Obviously getting nginx to serve up static files without going near PHP is going to be much quicker. So is there a way to get nginx to hash the request URL and check a temp folder to see if it exists?
Yes!
You can get nginx to cache the response from the fcgi. It is using the HttpProxyModule that you must have enabled into nginx.
Here is a good guide on how to do it.
Alternatively you can use nginx with memcache too. There are actually quite a few options to you. Both work really well!

How do I create a "clear cache" button for my site?

I'd like to create a button on my site that COMPLETELY clears my cache. As neither Safari's nor Chrome's features work at all it seems. Is this possible?
Not possible. That'd expose low-level functionality to public access. Even if an exploit would simply empty your cache, it'd still be undesireable. Firefox and Chrome both use shift-ctrl-del for this, so at the cost of actually having to use your keyboard, you can do the same thing without the security risk.
It sounds like you want to clear the cached data that sits between your server and your browser, not the data that the browser has cached. A copy of your resources mat be sitting on a machine between your client computer and your server, and that is returning the cached copy, instead of asking your server for the data again.
You should read up on different caching methods, so you can set up certain types of files to be cached for a certain amount of time etc. Try this for starters.
I usually set up static resources (css, js, etc.) to be cached for a long period of time, but I change the URL when I have made changes to it. I usually do this by rewriting the request url so /resources/dummy/file.css becomes /resources/file.css and I can change dummy whenever I want. This creates the allusion of a different file (that hasn't been cached yet) but I don't have to rename the file.
RewriteRule resources/[^/]+/([^/]+)$ resources/$1
Highly doubt this is possible moreover you want it to be cross-browser. It will create serious security flaw to be exploit.

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