JavaScript hard refresh of current page

Question

How can I force the web browser to do a hard refresh of the page via JavaScript?
Hard refresh means getting a fresh copy of the page AND refresh all the external resources (images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.).

Answer 1

Try to use:

location.reload(true);

When this method receives a true value as argument, it will cause the page to always be reloaded from the server. If it is false or not specified, the browser may reload the page from its cache.

More info:

• The location object

Answer 2

window.location.href = window.location.href

Answer 3

Accepted answer above no longer does anything except just a normal reloading on mostly new version of web browsers today. I've tried on my recently updated Chrome all those, including location.reload(true), location.href = location.href, and <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" />. None of them worked.

My solution is by using server-side capability to append non-repeating query string to all included source files reference as like below example.

<script src="script.js?t=<?=time();?>"></script>

So you also need to control it dynamically when to keep previous file and when to update it. The only issue is when files inclusion is performed via script by plugins you have no control to modify it. Don't worry about source files flooding. When older file is unlinked it will be automatically garbage collected.

Answer 4

Changing the current URL with a search parameter will cause browsers to pass that same parameter to the server, which in other words, forces a refresh.

(No guarantees if you use intercept with a Service Worker though.)

  const url = new URL(window.location.href);
  url.searchParams.set('reloadTime', Date.now().toString());
  window.location.href = url.toString();

If you want support older browsers:

if ('URL' in window) {
  const url = new URL(window.location.href);
  url.searchParams.set('reloadTime', Date.now().toString());
  window.location.href = url.toString();
} else {
  window.location.href = window.location.origin 
    + window.location.pathname 
    + window.location.search 
    + (window.location.search ? '&' : '?')
    + 'reloadTime='
    + Date.now().toString()
    + window.location.hash;
}

---

That said, forcing all your CSS and JS to refresh is a bit more laborious. You would want to do the same process of adding a searchParam for all the src attributes in <script> and href in <link>. That said it won't unload the current JS, but would work fine for CSS.

document.querySelectorAll('link').forEach((link) => link.href = addTimestamp(link.href));

I won't bother with a JS sample since it'll likely just cause problems.

You can save this hassle by adding a timestamp as a search param in your JS and CSS links when compiling the HTML.

Answer 5

For angular users and as found here, you can do the following:

<form [action]="myAppURL" method="POST" #refreshForm></form>

import { Component, OnInit, ViewChild } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  // ...
})
export class FooComponent {
  @ViewChild('refreshForm', { static: false }) refreshForm;

  forceReload() {
    this.refreshForm.nativeElement.submit();
  }
}

The reason why it worked was explained on this website: https://www.xspdf.com/resolution/52192666.html

You'll also find how the hard reload works for every framework and more in this article

explanation: Angular

Location: reload(), The Location.reload() method reloads the current URL, like the Refresh button. Using only location.reload(); is not a solution if you want to perform a force-reload (as done with e.g. Ctrl + F5) in order to reload all resources from the server and not from the browser cache. The solution to this issue is, to execute a POST request to the current location as this always makes the browser to reload everything.