TL;DR

Beware of caching by Cloudflare.

I activated Cloudflare as a frontend for a few toy web applications, mostly because it’s free (although I’m not 100% convinced about it as of every concentration of power. Anyway…).

While happily updating my application, I tried to change a few things in a stylesheet, mostly to figure out if I was getting my changes in the right place. Anyway, I could change the stylesheet like crazy, but I still got the same in the browser, even with the Shift+Ctrl-R which should be me begging for all caches to stay out of the way.

It turns out that Cloudflare does indeed cache aggressively, so the solution I found around is to let it think that the URL is a dynamic one, like adding a query part that always changes. So I have something like this in my Mojolicious layout template:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css?foo=<%= time() . rand() %>">

I feel lucky to have thought about it to be honest: I was reminded about putting these services behind Cloudflare only a few days ago, so it somehow stuck to my mind for the right amount of time.

If you have a similar problem… it might be something in the middle that you might not be aware of!