Browser cache issues - vue.js

I'm working on an online platform built on Vue CLI and i am experiencing problems with browser cache :
This is my scenario:
For each modification I make to the platform I need to build my application again (npm run build) . After that I push to a testing branch and do some other operations before going to production. At the end of the process, the old files are replaced by the new ones generated in the bundle.
And here comes my problem: when my customers go to access the platform after an update it
often doesn't load because they still have the old files in their browser's cache. Whenever
this happens, I advise them to clear their browser's cache and everything goes back to
normal, but this is quite inconvenient.
could someone give me any suggestion of what i could do to prevent this from happening
whenever i modify my platform files?

The following is the default configuration of the project generated by vue-cli
webpack.prod.conf.js:
output: {
path: config.build.assetsRoot,
filename: utils.assetsPath('js/[name].[chunkhash].js'),
chunkFilename: utils.assetsPath('js/[id].[chunkhash].js')
},
You can see that the file name after npm run build has a hash value added like js/vendor.658937d99bd7b1009d76.js, so there should be no cache problem.
Then it may be that the compiled index.html file is cached on the server side, which requires modifying the server configuration to not cache the index.html file.
For example, nginx configuration:
location / {
root html;
add_header Cache-Control no-store;
index index.html index.htm;
}
This way the browser will not cache the index.html file when loading.

Related

NuxtJS SPA mode (ssr false) still generates HTML for each vue file in the pages folder

The Nuxt documentation (latest) states that for SPA you need to set ssr: false in nuxt.config.js. Also, every vue file in the pages folder is added to the router configuration, so you don't have to do this yourself. This is both correct and works perfectly, but there is something I really don't understand.
When I run npm run build (nuxt-ts build), it builds the production output of the project and puts in the dist folder (default). I was surprised to see that even though I configured it to be a SPA, it still generates HTML files for each vue file in the pages folder.
It happens with newly generated projects using npx nuxt-create-app as well.
What I'd expect is that it only generates one HTML file (which is index) when ssr is set to false and when I want a static app, I would use npm run generate or set target to 'static' to create HTML files per route.
Nuxt documentation also states this for the target property:
https://nuxtjs.org/docs/2.x/get-started/commands#target-server-default-value (builds output to dist)
https://nuxtjs.org/docs/2.x/get-started/commands#target-static (generates HTML per route)
All I have in my config is ssr set to false, so it should not generate static files (HTML) per page.
What am I missing here, or am I misunderstanding how this works?
Thanks in advance!
Remember that in a static setup, your visitors may arrive at your site via any of your page routes— not just index.html.
For example, they may access https://www.your-app.com/contact-us. If you do not have a contact-us.html file available, and you don’t have a server configured to handle this request (as is the case with universal mode), you’re gonna end up with a 404.
What happens in static mode is contact-us.html is served, which contains the minimum javascript necessary to hydrate your nuxt app, then SPA mode kicks in— giving you client-side navigation.

Vue CLI build to external host?

I have a Vue CLI application that I'm currently working on that uses code splitting for JS and CSS, and builds almost 1,000 JS/CSS files on running npm run build.
I am hosting this application on Google Cloud Run, where I pay per request. While the cost is still not that significant, I was still looking to try and prevent the need for 500 requests for every page view. I had a thought, but I'm not sure it's possible...
What I was wondering was if I could have my webpack build generate the JS and CSS files into the dist folder, but reference those files in the index.html file with an external host, instead of assuming a relative path. For instance, the file would exist at dist/css/chunk-abc123.js but in index.html, it would be something like https://storage.google.../css/chunk-abc123.js.
That way, in my CI pipeline, I can upload those files from the dist directory into Google Cloud Storage, and serve them up statically from there.
Does anyone know if this is possible? If so, can you guide me in the right direction?
publicPath comes in rescue.
The base URL your application bundle will be deployed at (known as
baseUrl before Vue CLI 3.3). This is the equivalent of webpack's
output.publicPath, but Vue CLI also needs this value for other
purposes, so you should always use publicPath instead of modifying
webpack output.publicPath.
// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
...
publicPath: 'https://storage.google...'
...
}

export and maintain vue application

I have developed a vue application and did run npm run build
After that I uploaded the content in the dist file to my webpage but it returned a blank page.
Since I did this for testing I uploaded it to a folder in my public_html/mypage.com/vueapplication To get all the paths right I added a vue.config.js with this content:
// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
publicPath: '/vueapplication/'
}
The application now works but I wounder however:
how do I best publish/upload the application to my site? Just by simply dragging the content inte the right folder?
how can I best maintain my site? Do I need to build again and upload, overwriting my files when everytime I make an update on my site?
And what is the difference between build and deploy your application?
Drag and dropping your code should work. But as your app grows you may want to look into automating this. For instance if you use an S3 bucket you can use the aws cli to automate the upload.
Yes, you should overwrite your deploy folder(s). You need to also take care of deploying different binary files, that have the same name. An example is if you have a global css file (main.css for instance). The file will probably change content between deployments, but keep the same name. Browsers may cache the file so users that downloaded older versions of the file will not use the new one. There are different techniques to handle this, but if you use webpack, it uses cache busting techniques and you should be fine.
Build is the process of transforming source code into an artifact(s). Exactly what this means differs from language to language, platform to platform. In the vuejs world this usually means a couple of js files, a couple of css files and some assets.
Deploying means taking the output of a build and making it available to your users. Again this differs from project to project. In the vuejs world this usually means taking the artifacts from the build and uploading them to an http enabled web server.

Vue CLI build and run index.html file without server

I'm using the latest vue-cli version 3.0.
My current issue is that whenever I run npm run build the files generated in the dist folder can't be run without a server.
I would like to be able to just open the index.html file on the browser. How do I go about doing this?
I ran into a similar issue and the following two changes helped me to make it work. Now I can just open index.html in Chrome as a file to run my SPA from file system.
In vue.config.js, I did not have a publicPath configured, which resulted in the default "/".
I had to configure it to empty string like this so that it uses relative paths:
module.exports = {
publicPath: '',
}
PS: Since Vue CLI 3.3 use publicPath instead of the now deprecated baseURL
I was using the history mode of vue-router, which does not work
on a local file system to route the paths back to index.html. So I
omitted the mode to go back to the default hash mode.
I was able to fix this issue by manually changing the url of the referenced files.
It's a bit of a pain, but this was a solution without having to mess around with the build configuration.
What you need to do:
Open index.html
Find href=/ and replace with href=
Find src=/ and replace with src=
NOTE: I was in need of this solution because I was creating a Phonegap app.
You can use the http-server module
npm install http-server -g
http-server dist/
normally the server starts at port 8080 so you can serve the build app on http://localhost:8080

Aurelia skeleton-navigation: gulp watch takes 2min+ to start

I am using aurelia skeleton-es2016. Gulp watch takes at least 2 minutes. I have a dual-core 2.8Ghz amd with 6gb ram.
I initially had issues with missing modules after npm install but fixed those. Not sure if that is relevant to this case.
Also I'm not very experienced with gulp. Are the files being served from the the dist folder? Are those the files being watched by browser-sync for changes? I tried making a change to the index.html page and the change was not reflected in the browser without a reload. Is that file not among the ones watched?
It´s unusual that gulp watch needs so much time.
You should try to reinstall all npm and jspm packages.
If you have problems deleting the npm_modules folder you can try the tool I use in this case: Unlocker.
The files watched by browserSync are in your root folder .. You can see that under skeleton-es2016\build\tasks\serve.js this serve task is used by the watch task.
Or in your console where you are running gulp watch: [BS] Serving files from: .
If you used the newest skeleton-es2016 you should also have a browserSync control App running under http://localhost:3001/
BrowserSync will not detect changes inside your index.html file. That´s because of the watch task configuration:
only files under "src" will be watched.
You can see this configuration under: skeleton-es2016\build\paths.js and skeleton-es2016\build\tasks\watch.js