Caching CSS Issue

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a problem I was hoping someone could shed some light on. I noticed that with every request to my server, the css file was being requested. I went ahead and made a static link to the css file so there is no query string at all, but still I see the requests coming in with each request. Do I need to do anything else (in the response header maybe?) to make sure that browsers will cache the css?

I am on Rails 2.0.2

Thanks, Tom

2

Are you running in production mode? If so, then browsers should automatically cache the CSS file, afaik.

Because of how the request to load a page works it might always include the CSS file.

3

I am running the server in production mode and the css is actually being rendered by a controller (e.g. /css/my_dynamic.css). I've noticed that each time the page is hit, I see a request for the CSS.

4

If you're dynamically creating the CSS file every time, it will be requested by the browser every time. This may probably because the modification date changes every time you generate the file. (I don't really know--I'm just guessing.) Anyway, Ryan Bates has a screencast you should check out:

In episode #88 he creates a dynamic Javascript file. In episode #89 he caches that javascript file. Sounds like that might be just what you're looking for.

5

The timestamp query string is only created if you use the rails helper to link to the css. I went ahead and created a static link with no query string, but the browser still won't cache it! I'm wondering if I need to set something in the response header to tell the browser to cache.

Thanks for pointing out the screencast, I'll definitely check them out but I would imagine he is talking about server-side caching...

--Tom