Yes, it takes 5 minutes for just about everything to update in
ResourceLoader. This is also true for ResourceLoaderSiteStylesModule: when
you save an edit to e.g. MediaWiki:Common.css, you don't immediately see
the styles change. However, previewing edits to MediaWiki:Common.css does
work, because of some special handling.
When previewing, EditPage sets a content override (using
OutputPage::addContentOverride()) for the page being previewed, with the
text that's in the edit box. This content override is then propagated to
the ResourceLoaderContext object by OutputPage::getRlClientContext().
ResourceLoaderWikiModule checks these content overrides before accessing
wiki pages (which is how it gets the content from the edit box instead of
the content that's on the wiki page), and it also causes
shouldEmbedModule() to return true if there's a content override that
applies to it (which is how it avoids requesting the module from load.php
and instead embeds it as an inline <script>/<style> tag). The
TemplateSandbox extension also uses this, see
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/TemplateSandbox/+/340…
.
You may be able to do something similar to allow users to preview changes
to the theme variables: use content overrides (or some other mechanism) to
get the previewed values to your module, then return true from
shouldEmbedModule() when you detect that a preview is happening.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 10:32 AM Máté Szabó <mszabo(a)wikia-inc.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I am working on a custom ResourceLoader module whose style contents are
compiled from Sass stylesheets. These Sass stylesheets take as input
user-defined theme variables that affect the output.
I am looking for a way to invalidate ResourceLoader URLs that include such
style modules, when these variables change as a result of an user
action—primarily so that the user can see their own changes.
ResourceLoader will cache such style URLs for 5 minutes on the CDN and in
the user’s browser cache, so by default the user would have to wait until
their cached copy of styles expire before they would receive the updated
version. Accordingly, I have tried to explore if following the document
steps to empty one’s browser cache[1] after making changes would cause the
browser to fetch the updated resource from the backend. Unfortunately, both
Chrome and Firefox appear to send a “Cache-Control: no-cache” request
header for the style URL if the page is hard refreshed, which seems to
cause most CDNs (including WMF’s) to act as the source of truth and serve
the asset from cache if it is already there, without triggering a backend
fetch or conditional revalidation. In the case of a simple refresh,
Chromium and derivatives will not trigger a conditional revalidation of
resources including on a page since 2017,[2] so they just continue to use
the asset that was already in the browser’s cache. Thus, the standard
instructions for emptying one’s cache do not seem to be sufficient to allow
the user to see the effect of their styling changes.
Given the above, the only option I see that would allow the user to see
the updated styles after modifying input variables would be to append a
version hash to the style URL included in the page HTML—something which
ResourceLoader does not
currently do.
Do you know of a better approach to this problem? Are there any examples
in MediaWiki core or extensions that accomplish something similar? I have
consulted the code for ResourceLoaderSiteStylesModule, but it does not seem
to have any specific invalidation behaviour, nor does it use a version hash
in style URLs in the page HTML, so it seems that any updates to it take 5
minutes to propagate.
Thanks in advance!
—
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bypass_your_cache
[2]
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=505048
Cheers,
Máté Szabó
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
+36 30 947 5903
Fandom Poland sp. z o.o. z siedzibą w Poznaniu, ul. Abp. A. Baraniaka 6
Sąd Rejonowy Poznań – Nowe Miasto i Wilda w Poznaniu, VIII Wydział
Gospodarczy Krajowego Rejestru Sądowego, KRS 0000254365
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Kapitał zakładowy: 50.000,00 złotych
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