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I am writing my first web application using Flask and SQLAlchemy.

My CSS file is currently saved under a static folder and the styling is correctly applied to my webpage

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ url_for('static', filename='main.css') }}">

However when I try to update it (for example changing the fontweight from bold to normal) it will not show.

I could even remove all the content of my css file and my website will still look the same (as if the content was never deleted).

The only way I found to make updates was to create a new file "main2.css" and update the url link from the HTML file which is very inconvenient.

Has anyone found a better way?

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4 Answers 4

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It sounds like your CSS file is cached. You can test this by changing 'main.css' to 'main.css?something'. Some people append a date string or other to their CSS file so it busts cache periodically.

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It's possible you're getting the cached version of your CSS. After making updates to your CSS file, have you tried doing a hard reload? How you do this depends on the browser, but for Safari this can be done by holding Shift and clicking the Reload button.

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Indeed that's the case! After doing a hard reload I was able to see my updates. Thank you so much for helping!
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I had the same issues and I realised I couldn’t keep asking my users to do a hard reload. Constantly renaming my static folder (where all CSS/JS files were kept) seemed error-prone from a production devops perspective. Then I found this addon called flask-static-digest, which was adding md5 hashes to the file names as well as gzipping them. It is a good fix for my production server.

https://github.com/nickjj/flask-static-digest

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Another solution I found was really helpful during testing is to do a full reload in your browser (in my case Google Chrome) by shift-clicking the reload button.

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