What’s the Best Way to Handle Caching with Cloudflare?

Whenever you make changes, make sure to flush the cache. Keep in mind, though, browsers might still hold onto some cached files. It’s helpful to use versioning techniques like appending `?v=x` to file URLs when changes occur.

From my experience with Cloudflare, we handle caching by: 1. Renaming generated files like CSS/JS with every build. 2. Adding URL variables for non-generated files that may change, like images. 3. Occasionally purging the entire site's cache in Cloudflare to prevent serving outdated files.

The key is to understand the difference between browser caching and edge caching. For CSS and JS files, you should set the cache to one year, and whenever you update those files, just rename them. For your HTML pages, go shorter with a five-minute cache time and set the edge cache to a year. Once you've renamed your CSS or JS files, purge the cache for your pages to make sure they're using the latest files. You might also want to think about putting images and CSS/JS on a different domain to make purging easier without affecting all your assets.

Honestly, I just ignore the issues! But if you're looking for concrete strategies, my caching varies depending on the resource type. I use unpkg for CDN resources with versioned URLs, ensuring those don’t change unexpectedly. For same-origin stuff, I rely on validation techniques like etags. It minimizes server hits while keeping load times quick.

One strategy is to implement cache busting based on the file modification time (`filemtime`). This way, you can ensure that any changes will trigger a refresh without too much hassle.