Static files served in development should prevent caching

[Tim Graham]

We've ​been thinking about replacing our own staticfile serving code with something like ​whitenoise (#27572). Do you know if it has a suitable option?

[Kevin Christopher Henry]

I haven't used whitenoise before, but based on the ​documentation it looks like it's already doing what I proposed above:

WHITENOISE_MAX_AGE
    Default: 60 if not settings.DEBUG else 0

Time (in seconds) for which browsers and proxies should cache non-versioned files.

So, yes, a switch to whitenoise should solve this problem! I don't know how imminent that is, so I'll leave it up to you whether this is worth fixing in the meantime.

[Tim Graham]

Great, I don't see much value in duplicating work then.

[Mateusz Kurowski]

For future reference here is a monkey patch that works for me in development:

from functools import wraps

import django.http
import django.views.static


def no_cache_static(f):
    @wraps(f)
    def static(*a, **kw):
        response: django.http.response.HttpResponse = f(*a, **kw)
        response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache"
        return response

    return static


django.views.static.serve = no_cache_static(django.views.static.serve)