Cloudflare pages caching issue

[tech246]

Hi, we have an ongoing issue with caching. We use “wrangler pages publish …” to deploy our Cloudflare pages site. The main entry point for this page is /widget.min.js and we have a number of different Cloudflare operated domains for testing and production. Here’s an example of one of them, it’s linked to a .dev site:

The issue is, that following a publish of the site, when web pages request the widget, e.g. https://pay-qa.remuno.com/widget.min.js, the old pre-deployment version of the file continues to show up in the browser and when I manually request the file with curl. This can continue for up to an hour or so. Here’s an example after deployment which gives the old version:

curl -I https://pay-qa.remuno.com/widget.min.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:37:27 GMT
Content-Type: application/javascript
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Cache-Control: public, max-age=14400, must-revalidate
ETag: W/"b952134904bf12e1d8be8aa12d9543d4"
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
x-content-type-options: nosniff
Report-To: {"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\/\/a.nel.cloudflare.com\/report\/v3?s=fjbkIpfgmn3307HD8Xr7sj6UURKiBoDkDZSp3s2BIF
P7ngENAniHgQoSDuDhAI86SqyeHpjHM7CHKqAB%2B1koynjq4eTWPeUHn9G0hm4LolPpVTDkTcvlwkILv37zrBpzcqhoZg%3D%3D"}],"group":"cf-nel"
,"max_age":604800}
NEL: {"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
Vary: Accept-Encoding
CF-Cache-Status: HIT
Age: 7079
Server: cloudflare
CF-RAY: 7de5a34decac71a5-LHR
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400

If I ask to skip caching, I get the correct version of the file:

curl -H "Cache-Control: no-cache" -I `https://pay-qa.remuno.com/widget.min.js`
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:37:38 GMT
Content-Type: application/javascript
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Cache-Control: public, max-age=14400, must-revalidate
ETag: W/"92127a1ed7b6ebae771a36780072720e"
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
x-content-type-options: nosniff
Report-To: {"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\/\/a.nel.cloudflare.com\/report\/v3?s=E4bcnZ7xF95rpw1XZSLFI4vOvjPMYmDGU2XuuNlKzA
NnjMVqiXQmkzG9sd1UJLVV3pDe9F3xDgYYMWXlY1WsvhshIUdvqzGEMpqUKjuYzG8Lt38O1VDZuDMDCFdJapOGFvk8Wg%3D%3D"}],"group":"cf-nel","
max_age":604800}
NEL: {"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
Vary: Accept-Encoding
CF-Cache-Status: MISS
Server: cloudflare
CF-RAY: 7de5a38f484f071e-LHR
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400

Is there anything explicit I need to do with caching to avoid this situation?

[Chaika]

Pages has its own internal cache, that does not reflect in the cf-cache-status header. It is recommended to disable the normal zone cache, you can do so easily with a cache rule https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/caching/cache-rules/new:

If you have more then one hostname you want to skip, you can use the operator is in and type them out.

[tech246]

Thanks for the advice Chaika - much appreciated. We’ve put this in place and we’ll monitor on our next deployment. Will return and confirm if fixed.