Topic: How to stop cacheing visuals in clients browser cache

[clifft]

Hello,

I'm working on a Perl, mod_perl, HTML, CSS, JavaScript WWW application running on most resent Windows 11 using the Apache server. I put the following in my config file to try to prevent caching of visuals (static and dynamic content) from my application in a clients browser cache. My reason for trying to do this is that when the server software is updated with new static/dynamic content in visuals, I want to ensure that the client will see those changes.

<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|js|css|pl|pm|cgi)$">
Header set Cache-Control "no-cache"
Header set Content-Type "text/html; charset=utf-8"
Header set X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff"
</FilesMatch>

SetEnvIf Request_URI "\.(html|htm|js|css|pl|pm|cgi)$" NO_CACHE
Header set Cache-Control "no-cache" env=NO_CACHE
Header set Content-Type "text/html; charset=utf-8" env=NO_CACHE
Header set X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" env=NO_CACHE

ServerTokens Prod

No headers appear in the network section of developers tools and I get the following messages in the console.

A 'cache-control' header is missing or empty.
Security
Response should include 'x-content-type-options' header.

I'm running a simple HTML hello world program to see if the headers appear. I am doing this testing using my server as a client.

Any help is appreciated.

CliffT

[clifft]

Maybe this is not working because it should not be done because its already being done by the server and client cache. I read

cache policies typically apply to static assets only. Dynamic content, such as user-generated data or server-rendered pages, is usually not cached or has a much shorter cache duration to ensure that users see up-to-date information.

as the control over static content is in the hands of the website owner, making changes to it is much easier. All you need to do is ask your web development team to do the change and publish it on the live environment of your site. Browser request the server to send the static page content only when there is a new version of that page.

Unlike static content, the server does not render dynamic web pages in advance. Instead, when the user requests to open a dynamic page, the server will render the content on the spot and send it to the user (a.k.a server-side rendering).

If you all agree, this question can be closed???

[James Blond]

To force the client / browser to download a resource you can add a random query. Like addin the current timestamp.