IIS CSS Caching

Greg picture Greg · Sep 22, 2008 · Viewed 12.7k times · Source

When we are developing new sites or testing changes in new ones that involve css after the new code is committed and someone goes to check the changes they always see a cached version of the old css. This is causing a lot of problems in testing because people never are sure if they have the latest css on screen (I know shift and clicking refresh clears this cache but I can't expect end users to know to do this). What are my possible solutions?

Answer

Rob picture Rob · Sep 22, 2008

If you're serving your CSS from static files (or anything that the query string doesn't matter for), try varying that to ensure that the browser makes a fresh request, as it will think that it's pulling a completley different resource, so have for example:

"styles.css?token=1234" in the CSS reference in your markup and change the value of "token" on each CSS check-in