Force refresh cached index.html file in Node express - node.js

Question

What is the best way to make sure all users get a fresh index.html instead of cached index.html?
So last week I tried to make the user cache the js and css bundles for a Single page application. I did it adding max age in the server.js file:
app.use(express.static('build', { maxAge: '365d' }));
The problem is that the index.html file is also in the build folder. Which means that it`s being cached client side for 365 days...
So even though I have cache busting on the js and css bundles, the index.html file is always the same and therefore the bundles stays the same because of the old hash.
I have now changed the server to use Etag instead:
app.use(express.static('build', { etag: true }));
This works great.
The problem is that i pushed this to production and now all the users have an stale index.html.
I use Node express and AWS Application Load balancer.
The endpoint which sends the index.html looks like this:
app.get('*', (request, response) => {
response.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, 'build/index.html'));
});
Does anyone have a smart solution?
I have looked into using a php file like this: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/1910 . Is that the best solution?

Answer 1

I had a related problem where, after a deployment, users would need to hard refresh in certain browsers. It was due to blindly caching all build files, including the index.html.
Here's how we resolved it:
app
.use(express.static(BUILD, {
maxAge: '30 days',
setHeaders: (res, path) => {
if (express.static.mime.lookup(path) === 'text/html') {
// Skip cache on html to load new builds.
res.setHeader('Cache-Control', 'public, max-age=0');
}
}
}))
.get('/*', (req, res) => res.sendFile(HTML));

Answer 2

You can send header no-cache when using index.html route
For example:
app.get('/', (request, response) => {
response.header('Cache-Control', 'private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate');
response.header('Expires', '-1');
response.header('Pragma', 'no-cache');
response.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, 'build/index.html'));
});