I am currently testing a web site as the development goes on, and almost every time the client script is updated, I need to clear the browser cache for a new functionality to become available on the client due to the fact that the browser downloads the fresh compy of the .js file.
What if in production I roll out a new version of a script? How do I get the client browsers to get it as soon as it is uploaded to the server?
I am using an ASP.NET MVC 4 site.
Rename the file to create versioning:
so
<script src="myscript.js"></script>
becomes
<script src="myscript-9-5-2012.js"></script>
Also per https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/caching#LeverageProxyCaching
It's not recommended to use querystrings for versioning (ie. myscript.js?v=1.1.0) because specifically
Most proxies, most notably Squid up through version 3.0, do not cache resources with a "?" in their URL ...
The best way to stop your scripts from caching is to add a random querystring value at the end of each line. e.g.
<script src="/path-to-your-script/script.js?v=0b1"></script>
This is great in development as your scripts never get cached, although in production you do really want the browser to cache the scripts to speed things up.
So for production, you would probably want to introduce some versioning like jquery for instance, jquery-1.8.0.js
