This page contains a set of example caching strategies you can use with Workbox.
Google Fonts
The Google Fonts service consists of two parts:
- The stylesheet with the
@font-facedefinitions, which link to the font files. - The static, revisioned font files.
The stylesheet can change frequently, so it's best to use a caching strategy like stale while revalidate that checks for updates with every request. The font files themselves, on the other hand, do not change and can leverage a cache first strategy.
Here we've limited the age of the cached font files to one year (matching the
HTTP Cache-Control header) and the max entries to 30 (to ensure we don't use
up too much storage on the user's device).
// Cache the Google Fonts stylesheets with a stale-while-revalidate strategy.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/^https:\/\/fonts\.googleapis\.com/,
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate({
cacheName: 'google-fonts-stylesheets',
})
);
// Cache the underlying font files with a cache-first strategy for 1 year.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/^https:\/\/fonts\.gstatic\.com/,
new workbox.strategies.CacheFirst({
cacheName: 'google-fonts-webfonts',
plugins: [
new workbox.cacheableResponse.Plugin({
statuses: [0, 200],
}),
new workbox.expiration.Plugin({
maxAgeSeconds: 60 * 60 * 24 * 365,
maxEntries: 30,
}),
],
})
);
Caching Images
You might want to use a cache-first strategy for images, by matching against a list of known extensions.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/\.(?:png|gif|jpg|jpeg|webp|svg)$/,
new workbox.strategies.CacheFirst({
cacheName: 'images',
plugins: [
new workbox.expiration.Plugin({
maxEntries: 60,
maxAgeSeconds: 30 * 24 * 60 * 60, // 30 Days
}),
],
})
);
Cache CSS and JavaScript Files
You might want to use a stale-while-revalidate strategy for CSS and JavaScript files that aren't precached.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/\.(?:js|css)$/,
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate({
cacheName: 'static-resources',
})
);
Caching Content from Multiple Origins
You can create regular expressions to cache similar requests from multiple
origins in a single route. For example, you can cache assets from origins
like googleapis.com and gstatic.com with a single route.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/.*(?:googleapis|gstatic)\.com/,
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate(),
);
An alternative to the above example is to cache the origins separately to store assets in cache for each origin.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/.*googleapis\.com/,
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate({
cacheName: 'googleapis',
})
);
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
/.*gstatic\.com/,
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate({
cacheName: 'gstatic',
})
);
Restrict Caches for a Specific Origin
You can cache assets for a specific origin and apply expiration rules on that cache. For example, the example below caches up to 50 requests for up to 5 minutes.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/api',
new workbox.strategies.CacheFirst({
cacheName: 'stories',
plugins: [
new workbox.expiration.Plugin({
maxEntries: 50,
maxAgeSeconds: 5 * 60, // 5 minutes
}),
new workbox.cacheableResponse.Plugin({
statuses: [0, 200],
}),
],
})
);
Force a Timeout on Network Requests
There may be network requests that would be beneficial if they were served from the network, but could benefit by being served by the cache if the network request is taking too long.
For this, you can use a NetworkFirst strategy with the
networkTimeoutSeconds option configured.
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/api',
new workbox.strategies.NetworkFirst({
networkTimeoutSeconds: 3,
cacheName: 'stories',
plugins: [
new workbox.expiration.Plugin({
maxEntries: 50,
maxAgeSeconds: 5 * 60, // 5 minutes
}),
],
})
);
Cache Resources from a Specific Subdirectory
You can use a regular expression to easily route requests to files in a
specific directory. If we wanted to route requests to files in /static/,
we could use the regular expression new RegExp('/static/'), like so:
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
new RegExp('/static/'),
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate()
);
Cache Resources Based on Resource Type
You can use the
RequestDestination
enumerate type of the
destination
of the request to determine a strategy.
For example, when the target is <audio> data:
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
// Custom `matchCallback` function
({event}) => event.request.destination === 'audio',
new workbox.strategies.CacheFirst({
cacheName: 'audio',
plugins: [
new workbox.expiration.Plugin({
maxEntries: 60,
maxAgeSeconds: 30 * 24 * 60 * 60, // 30 Days
}),
],
})
);
Access Caches from Your Web App's Code
The Cache Storage
API is available
for use in both service worker and in the context of window clients. If you
want to make changes to caches—add or remove entries, or get a list of cached
URLs—from the context of your web app, you can do so directly, without having to
communicate with the service worker via postMessage().
For instance, if you wanted to add a URL to the a given cache in response to a user action in your web app, you can use code like the following:
// Inside app.js:
async function addToCache(urls) {
const myCache = await window.caches.open('my-cache');
await myCache.addAll(urls);
}
// Call addToCache whenever you'd like. E.g. to add to cache after a page load:
window.addEventListener('load', () => {
// ...determine the list of related URLs for the current page...
addToCache(['/static/relatedUrl1', '/static/relatedUrl2']);
});
The cache name, 'my-cache', can then be referred to when setting up a route in
your service worker, and that route can take advantage of any cache entries
that were added by the web page itself:
// Inside service-worker.js:
workbox.routing.registerRoute(
new RegExp('/static/'),
new workbox.strategies.StaleWhileRevalidate({
cacheName: 'my-cache', // Use the same cache name as before.
})
);