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rack-cache-smash

rack-cache-smash is a Rack middleware to cache bust every CSS and JS asset request, intended for development environments only and not recommended for production.

Cache busting happens by modifying all HTML responses that contain paths to JS and CSS files. These file paths are appended with a timestamp query string parameter to force browsers to re-download the files for every single page load as they always have a unique URL.

Admittedly, this is a sledgehammer of a middleware to overcome those browser caching issues that sometimes arise during development. I don't advise using it in production, and I doubt that you want to.

At the time of writing this, I'm using rack-cache-smash during development to overcome a problem in iOS 7.0.2 where incomplete asset downloads seem to be cached and some weirdness I've seen in IE10 on Windows 8 with assets, 304 Not Modified responses, and SSL.

Installation

Add the rack-cache-smash gem to the development group in your application's Gemfile:

group :development do
    ...
    gem 'rack-cache-smash'
end

And then execute:

$ bundle

For Rails apps, add this line to config/application.rb:

config.middleware.use(Rack::CacheSmash)

For Rack apps that don't use Rails, then place Rack::CacheSmash earlier in your middleware stack than the middleware(s) that generates response HTML.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Run tests (rake test)
  4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  6. Create new Pull Request

Releasing a new gem

  1. Update pre-release version to the release version in lib/rack-cache-smash/version.rb, e.g. '1.0.1.pre' becomes '1.0.1'
  2. Update CHANGELOG.md
  3. Tests pass? (rake test)
  4. Build the gem (rake build)
  5. Release on rubygems.org (rake release)
  6. Update version to the next pre-release version in lib/rack-cache-smash/version.rb, e.g. '1.0.1' becomes '1.0.2.pre'