Tomcat prevent static resource caching

Question

I have read through several answers to this and none of them have worked. I have put a cachingAllowed in my app's META-INF/context.xml.

I have put cachingAllowed = 'false' in the server.xml and context.xml in vain. I have also deleted my work/[app] cache, this is what I'm seeing on resources coming back.

JSP - Looks good!

Request URL:/loadconf.jsp

Request Method:GET

Status Code:200 OK

Request Headers

Accept:/

Referer:http://localhost/

User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.59 Safari/534.3

Response Headers

Content-Type:application/javascript;charset=UTF-8

Date:Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:52:35 GMT

Server:Apache-Coyote/1.1

Transfer-Encoding:chunked

JS - Looks bad

Request URL:yuiloader-dom-event.js

Request Method:GET

Status Code:200 OK

Request Headers

Accept:/

Referer:http://localhost/

User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.59 Safari/534.3

Response Headers

Accept-Ranges:bytes

Cache-Control:max-age=15552000 bad

Content-Length:60327

Content-Type:text/javascript

Date:Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:39:57 GMT

ETag:W/"60327-1273012296000" bad

Expires:Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:39:57 GMT bad

Last-Modified:Tue, 04 May 2010 22:31:36 GMT

Server:Apache-Coyote/1.1

Answer 1

The easy approach, use Apache, something like this:

# Configure Tomcat proxys
<VirtualHost localhost:80>

  ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/

  #for files that have no header
  ExpiresDefault now
  ExpiresByType text/javascript now

  #overwrite the headers tomcat is foolishly trying to provide
  Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, must-revalidate"
  Header set Expires "January 1, 1970" #this should be "now", but it wasn't working for me

</VirtualHost>

My static files come back with 200 responses now.