NodeJS/express: Cache and 304 status code

Easiest solution:

app.disable('etag');

Alternate solution here if you want more control:

http://vlasenko.org/2011/10/12/expressconnect-static-set-last-modified-to-now-to-avoid-304-not-modified/

Try using private browsing in Safari or deleting your entire cache/cookies.

I've had some similar issues using chrome when the browser thought it had the website in its cache but actually had not.

The part of the http request that makes the server respond a 304 is the etag. Seems like Safari is sending the right etag without having the corresponding cache.

I had the same problem in Safari and Chrome (the only ones I've tested) but I just did something that seems to work, at least I haven't been able to reproduce the problem since I added the solution. What I did was add a metatag to the header with a generated timstamp. Doesn't seem right but it's simple :)

<meta name="304workaround" content="2013-10-24 21:17:23">

Update P.S As far as I can tell, the problem disappears when I remove my node proxy (by proxy i mean both express.vhost and http-proxy module), which is weird...

As you said, Safari sends Cache-Control: max-age=0 on reload. Express (or more specifically, Express's dependency, node-fresh) considers the cache stale when Cache-Control: no-cache headers are received, but it doesn't do the same for Cache-Control: max-age=0. From what I can tell, it probably should. But I'm not an expert on caching.

The fix is to change (what is currently) line 37 of node-fresh/index.js from

if (cc && cc.indexOf('no-cache') !== -1) return false;  

to

if (cc && (cc.indexOf('no-cache') !== -1 ||
  cc.indexOf('max-age=0') !== -1)) return false;

I forked node-fresh and express to include this fix in my project's package.json via npm, you could do the same. Here are my forks, for example:

https://github.com/stratusdata/node-fresh https://github.com/stratusdata/express#safari-reload-fix

The safari-reload-fix branch is based on the 3.4.7 tag.