React JS Code delivery | Hacker News Reader

React JS Code delivery

3 pointscrookie11 comments

How do you make sure that your users are using the latest React JS code ? Some of my users do not close their tabs or browser window and they keep on using the old code. How to make sure that does not happen ? TIA

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Google JavaScript cache busting.

Some tools, like Ruby on Rails will compute a unique signature as part of the file name for each file when you prepare for deployment to production. This helps ensure that every time you deploy new code, only the new version of everything will be linked to.

If you use WebPack it may help you out quite a bit. Take a look here https://medium.com/powerspace-engineering/how-to-cache-busti...

It is not actually about cache busting. I generate unique filenames for all my JS files and other assets when they update, but the client browser gets to know about them when they download index file, untill then they dont need anything else. So, there are some users who do not refresh browser ever and keep on using the same tab always. I want them to always use the latest index file and thus the latest code. Is there a way to do it just using cache ?

If you really want to do it:

1) Store the result of Date.now() somewhere when the app starts

2) Have an interval to check the difference between Date.now() and the timestamp you stored in 1)

3) If the difference is over a certain threshold, force a page reload

(or schedule a page reload for when the user is in a "safe" state)

Or you could probably poll an endpoint / listen to a websocket and trigger the reloading by flipping a switch or sending a message. It won't be a client-only solution, though.

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it . Will update with what approach i took. I am most probably going to use the webpack hash to do the check .

(In reality, you should ask yourself why your users are behaving like that: don't they shut down their computer ever? Don't they like updates? That's pretty odd behaviour)

We are building a new product , and every time we release a new feature , our sales team call up and inform them about the change. Some of them do not refresh their screen and so changes are not visible to them , at that time our sales rep have to ask them to refresh it. It kind of give a bad feeling to the user and so we wanted to do something about it.

Is it that odd? How often do you close the tab containing your email client for example? I literally only ever close mine by accident, and there are a lot of environments in which machines are rarely rebooted.

Well, it's not that odd, but refreshing the app after doing some check using API's is the only way ?

Take a look at: https://medium.com/releasepage/how-to-update-your-running-we...

Git repo here: https://github.com/releasepage/reload.js

Thanks, will look into it . :)

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