How to force update Single Page Application (SPA) pages?

Question

In fully server side based rendering (non Web 2.0), deploying server side code would directly update client side pages upon page reload. In contrast, in React based Single P

Answer 1

I know this is an old thread, and service workers are probably the best answer. But I have a simple approach that appears to work:

I added a meta tag to my "index.html" file :

I then have a very simple php scrip in the same folder as the index.html that responds to a simple REST request. The PHP script parses the server copy of the index.html file, extracts the version number and returns it. In my SPA code, every time a new page is rendered I make an ajax call to the PHP script, extract the version from the local meta tag and compare the two. If different I trigger an alert to the user.

PHP script:

find('meta') as $e){
        if ( $e->name == $name){
            return $e->content ;
        }
    }
}