Fair enough - I thought I checked the thread and only found references to renaming the files, not changing the content, though I agree it is implied. Just expected to see it as a step when the process was being described step by step.


Hmm, but in that case, why go through all the hassle of renaming the files? Using a query parameter (e.g., foo.css?v=###) where ### could be the svn repository version means there's nothing to change on the server filesystem, nor any rewrite rules necessary. And if your site is dynamically generated, the reference could be inserted at render time, so no checkout post-processing ever needed (just an "svn update" on the server).

Just as I was doing my final preview of this post I saw your edit and the comment on query tags, so no answer required, but I figured I'd leave a separate opinion in this post, since I'm on the other subjective side in terms of liking the look of a version parameter than a new filename (I guess I see the version as a temporal dimension of the same named file).

Though as an aside, I am interested in experiences where any caches break such approaches. At worst, it may prevent some intermediate caching due to overly conservative caches not caching anything with a query string. Certainly a lot more than css/js would break through any cache not considering query strings as part of the identity of a cached element.


No biggie - just an extra step of "update content to match" would probably be more than sufficient.

-- David

There's a super easy way to do this without relying on VCS integration such as post-commit hooks. (Everyone should be using some sort of VCS, but anyway.)

PHP:

$timestamp = filemtime("example.css");
$display_filename = "example-$timestamp.css";
echo '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="' . $display_filename . '" />';

This will append a 10-digit Unix timestamp to the end of your CSS filename, and this value will change if and only if the CSS file gets modified. Now go ahead and create a rewrite rule that strips that hyphen and 10 digits from the end of your CSS filename.

Note: Unix time will become 11 digits sometime around the year 2300.

I better get ready for that!

I suspect the signed/unsigned 32-bit rollover in 2038 is going to be more "exciting", not to mention something we're more likely to be alive for

-- David

I suspect in 28 years we'll all be running 64 bit systems so that shouldn't be a problem! Of course someone...somewhere...in a deep dark hole will still have a 32 bit system like those ye olde systems that still run on cobol and the like.