Magento 1.9 – How to Completely Disable Cache for Development

cachingmagento-1.9

I am developing a script which is in the skin folder.
I lost many hours because of the weird caching mechanism of Magento.

I already disabled all the caches in the backend, but it still caches.
I opened the developer console and enabled "disable cache" in the browser, but it makes no difference.

It does not use the latest script file, even if I empty the var/cache folder.

I also cleared the Javascript/CSS cache and every possible cache.

How on earth should I develop if it caches so hard? I always have to wait about 1-2 minutes until the file is loaded instead of the cached one.

Is it possible to completely turn it off?

Best Answer

Magento 1.9 doesn't have such a rigerous caching mechanism by default as Magento 2 does, so you should be able to load the new JS file by just clearing the cache from the backend or by disabling it completely.

But if this is not casued by Magento's internal cache or the browser cache, then it might be a reverse proxy cache like Varnish or Apache's mod_cache that is providing the old JS file for a certain period of time (1-2 mins like you said) before it is invalidated and refreshed.

This would be a misconfiguration of the reverse proxy. If your server really is using a reverse proxy I suggest disabling it for development purposes, because you'll experience many issues like this while you develop the site (which is a huge time waster and nerve destroyer).

Also just to be safe, I'd recommend trying with a different browser and/or actually clearing the browser cache after a file is changed, since your browser installation might be corrupted and the disable browser cache functionality in developer tools might be bugged.

Related Solutions

Magento – Disable page cache for a single block

You can't disable single block cache like in magento 1,

Magento recommends handling customer related data via ajax.

So you need to create an api endpoint or section data and use javascript to retrieve the data and load it on front :)

https://amasty.com/blog/how-to-use-sections-in-magento-2/

Magento – Magento 2: How to disable caching for the header block

The customer specific data(private data) is not a part of the public content, so there is no need to disable caching using cacheable attribute.

Regarding the issue, the proper section of documentation is http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.2/extension-dev-guide/cache/page-caching/private-content.html

The private data is stored in browser local storage. This data is cleaned up using the rules described in section.xml files. For your case, the xml will be like following:

<action name="customer/account/logout"/>
<action name="customer/account/loginPost"/>
<action name="customer/account/createPost"/>
<action name="customer/account/editPost"/>
<action name="customer/ajax/login">
    <section name="checkout-data"/>
    <section name="cart"/>
</action>

It means that browser will flush the data in local storage on every POST request to the urls described above (except /customer/ajax/login - for this case Magento do only partial cleanup). So, to fix your issue you need to check:

The login URL is present in some section.xml file. If no, just add it in custom module
Your Magento instance uses POST request to login URL
Make sure you don't have any JS errors in the browser console, which might prevent JS from cleaning the local storage
Make sure that private data is not a part of the public content. It must be delivered only using section sources

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Magento – Disable page cache for a single block

Magento – Magento 2: How to disable caching for the header block

Related Topic