Agent Wranglers

Site architecture Recommended

Keep the previous build's assets

After a deploy, keep the previous build's hashed files, so pages cached before the deploy still find their scripts.

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Copy the old build's hashed asset folder into the new one without overwriting. Use cp -r --update=none on GNU systems, or cp -rn on macOS and BSD. Delete files older than a few deploys.

Example

# before the swap: carry old hashed files into the new build, never overwrite
cp -r --update=none /srv/site/live/assets/. /srv/site/next/assets/

How to check

Load a page, deploy, then reload it from the cache. There are no 404s.

For agents: if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/site-architecture/keep-the-previous-build-s-assets.