Recently, at some project, we planned to dedicate some time to improve our deployment and build packing process, so we can use the solution in future projects.
What we decided to do:
- make a pack of all the Java scripts and CSSes, to reduce the page load time
- make a static content versionable
If first is quite a common practise, I wan’t to tell more about the second point, on example.
We use an automatic deployment system. So installing of new software version can be done easily and takes little time. So, for example, if we faced some serious bug with CSS, something is very bad with User Interface and the problem is with some external CSS directive.
If we will just change solve the problem, locally in those CSS file, make a build and upload it to the server we’ll have some users, with loggined sessions and cached CSS files in browser. We have uploaded the fixed version of CSS, but user still see the old one, with bugs.
The same problems can arise with all the static content(java scripts, CSS files, images). So we decided to make that content versionable too. Main purpose is to force the browser to load new version of those content, when we deploy new version.
That is how we decided to do that:
