To optimise network load time, browsers cache static files. Caching greatly improves performance but how do you inform browsers to invalidate cache when your files have changed?
Cache busting is a simple but effective solution for this issue. There are
several ways to achieve this but the way this library does this is by
changing file names to include the hash of the files' contents. So if you
have bundle.js, it will become
bundle.long-sha256-hash.js. This lets you set a super long
cache age as, because of the file names changing, the path to the
filename, too, will change. So as far as the browser is concerned, you are
trying to load a file that it doesn't have.
Pretty neat, isn't it?
SHA-256 based name generation during compile-timeMIME filters