sidebar not refreshing without clearing cache

[geohei]

Question

Hi.

mdbook 0.4.44
Windows 10, Firefox and Ubuntu 24.04, Firefox (browser doesn't seem to make a difference)

The sidebar only refreshes on local browser (http://127.0.0.1:3000 from mdbuild serve).
On browser accessing remote server, I need to clear the browser cache (Firefox, CTRL+F5).
Chapter data refreshes correctly on both browsers, from local and remote server.

In other words - when I change my pages, the local version of ./book (sidebar and chapter data) is shown correctly on the local browser when mdbook serve is active. I only need to refresh. All good. However when I copy './book' to the server, the same data changes only shows the new chapter data, not the new sidebar data. I need to clear the browser cache (Firefox, CTRL F5) to make the new sidebar data show up.

Did I miss something or is this a bug related to invalidating caches?

Version

mdbook 0.4.44

[ehuss]

Can you say more about what kind of server you are using? What kind of caching is it configured for?

@notriddle Do you have any insights into what needs to be considered for caching the sidebar data on update? Do we need to add something like #1368 to resolve that?

[notriddle]

As far as caching goes, the sidebar.js is no different than any other js file. We don't do any caching of our own. If it's getting cached, it probably means your web server is configured to serve CSS and JS with a far-future Expires date (or you have a CDN that does it).

That's not supported. #1368 adds support for it, and would therefore fix this problem. Configuring the web server to stop serving these resources with far-future Expires would also fix it.

[geohei]

@ehuss
The mdBook which I was referring to is hosted at Dreamhost, shared server plan, so no CDN.
There's not very much I can change regarding caching.
But I will ask what can be done ...

@notriddle
I will ask them about the far-future expiry dates.
This is the first time I noticed such a thing with pages I host with them

... later ...

My provider (Dreamhost) suggested this:
https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/216363157-Cache-a-website-with-an-htaccess-file

# Disable Caching
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
    Header set Pragma "no-cache"
    Header set Expires 0
</IfModule>

Above works, though I don't know if this is not overkill?

Nevertheless, since subject cache problem doesn't seem common (didn't find anybody else having this issue with mdbook), I wonder if Dreamhost's cache policy is different than other providers'?

Also, why does only mdbook behave like that with Dreamhost regarding caches? Other web sites (e.g. WordPres, NextGen, ...) don't show this cache problem without having above .htaccess entry.

[StefanSalewski]

I had a similar cache issue a few times in the last months, and again today with Chromium: File name of a section changed, while section title in TOC remained unchanged. That change was applied to SUMMARY.md. New content was deployed with rsync, pushing the new files, while keeping the old ones. Chomium was displaying the old file, until its cache was cleared manually. That might be an issue for users unfortunately. See https://rust-for-c-programmers.salewskis.de/

[StefanSalewski]

Actually I can confirm the initially issue, I just noted it as well with Chromium browser.

[StefanSalewski]

Actually, this issue is not fully solved. I just added one more section to chapter 8, functions. Chromium browser refused to display the modified TOC, listing only 16 sections. Mozilla worked fine, and Chromium too after clearing cache. Perhaps the problem is, that I upload the files with rsync, so old files get not deleted. So errors is not that easily noticeable, as the old files are still available, and get displayed.

The behavior was, that clicking with the mouse on TOC entries, displayed the old content. But paging with the button on the right of the page forward, shows the updated content. But TOC continued to show the old content, until cache was cleared.

[notriddle]

Did you add hash-files = true to the book.toml file?

[StefanSalewski]

Did you add [hash-files = true] to the book.toml file?

No.

Actually, yesterday I got mdbook version mdbook-0.4.46::gentoo, and a test with that version gave no issues.

[StefanSalewski]

Chromium still has issues, while Firefox works fine.

I deleted "17.4 The Prelude" from TOC, and Chromium still shows it.

Should I add [hash-files = true] to the book.toml file?

[StefanSalewski]

Seems to make no difference:

$ cat book.toml 
[book]
authors = ["S. Salewski"]
language = "en"
multilingual = false
src = "src"
title = "Rust for C-Programmers"
[rust]
edition = "2024"
[output.html.playground]
editable = true
[output.html]
git-repository-url = "https://github.com/StefanSalewski/Rust_for_C-Programmers"
smart-punctuation = true
[output.html.print]
enable = true    # include support for printable output
page-break = true # insert page-break after each chapter
hash-files = true

[notriddle]

It needs to go under the html section, not the print section.