Django won't refresh staticfiles

Question

This is annoying. I have a javascript file referenced on a django template:

Answer 1

If you don't want to refresh the browser cache each time you change your CSS and JavaScript files, or while styling images, you need to set STATIC_URLdynamically with a varying path component. With the dynamically changing URL, whenever the code is updated, the visitor's browser will force loading of all-new uncached static files. In this recipe, we will set a dynamic path for STATIC_URL using time of last edit in os.

import os
from datetime import datetime    

def get_file_changeset(absolute_path):
    timestamp = max(map(lambda x: os.path.getmtime(x[0]), os.walk(os.path.join(absolute_path, 'static'))))
    try:
        timestamp = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(int(timestamp))
    except ValueError:
        return ""
    changeset = timestamp.strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S')
    return changeset

And next change in your SETTINGS:

from utils.misc import get_file_changeset
STATIC_URL = "/static/%s/" % get_file_changeset(BASE_DIR)

How it works:
The get_file_changeset()function takes the absolute_path directory as a parameter and calls the os.path.getmtime() to each file in each nested directory and finds the last-edited file (with its max edit time). The timestamp is parsed; converted to a string consisting of year, month, day, hour, minutes, and seconds; returned; and included in the definition of STATIC_URL.

Note: With this you have to reload dev server each time when you edit your static files.