Add a bust_browser_cache flag to the static template tag

[David Kerkeslager]

The proposal is to add a bust_browser_cache flag to the static template tag using a similar syntax to passing context variables to the include template tag. It would look something like this:

{% static 'css/style.css' with bust_browser_cache=True %}

The flag would default to False to avoid breaking existing usages of the static tag.

What flag does is add a cache_hash get parameter to the URL of the static file, with a hash of the static file. So if the content of css/style.css looks like:

p {
    color: magenta;
}

The generated URL will look like /static/css/style.css?cache_hash=0756793258f5ea00cda3e445de6bb595.

If the content of css/style.css changes to:

p {
    color: magenta;
}
p::after {
    content: "Sorry about this awful color.";
}

Then the link would be /static/css/style.css?cache_hash=c3aebd6286841ce8f4d76aa8d3eba487.

This is not a security feature, so I think it would be best to use MD5 because it is fast.

Instead, the purpose of this is to allow us to serve static files with Cache-Control: immutable or Cache-Control: max-age=<some large number> without fear. As long as the content of the file does not change, the URL's cache_hash will not change, so the browser will use the cached version. But if the content of the static file changes, the cache_hash parameter will change, causing the browser to request the new version of the file. This gets us the best of both worlds: we maximize usage of browser cache for static files, while never having to worry that our users are seeing stale versions of static files.

It may make sense to store the MD5 hash in Django's cache so that it doesn't get calculated every time.

[David Kerkeslager]

I can implement this ticket, but I haven't contributed to Django before, and looking at the relevant source code it's going to take me a little while to figure out how to do it. If someone else wants to do it who is more familiar with the codebase, it would probably get done quicker.

[Simon Charette]

Isn't this something that is already implemented through ManifestStaticFilesStorage and CachedStaticFilesStorage?

​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#manifeststaticfilesstorage

[David Kerkeslager]

Replying to Simon Charette:

Isn't this something that is already implemented through ManifestStaticFilesStorage and CachedStaticFilesStorage?

​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#manifeststaticfilesstorage

Hm. I wasn't aware of that and it is pretty similar, but doing that globally and continuing to store the old files means that a) we can't turn it on/off for individual files (i.e. the hash time for videos/images probably isn't worth it, as they don't change as much as CSS files) and b) references to old files don't throw any errors, they just fail silently. I think that will handle my use case, though. Thanks for taking the time to respond.