Need to do a hard reload in browser to see changes in localhost

support
1

Hugo experience level: novice

I’m making changes locally to my site while running the hugo server. It is detecting the changes and doing rebuilds. However, I have to use Ctrl+F5 to see the changes in the browser.

If I then do a normal refresh, it loads the old version again.

I’m running hugo v0.11.0 on a Windows 11 computer. I have the developer tools open and “disable cache” enabled.

Any ideas? Here’s the command line output

❯ hugo server --disableFastRender
Start building sites …
hugo v0.110.0-e32a493b7826d02763c3b79623952e625402b168+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2023-01-17T12:16:09Z VendorInfo=gohugoio

               | EN

-------------------±-----
Pages | 29
Paginator pages | 0
Non-page files | 0
Static files | 131
Processed images | 0
Aliases | 0
Sitemaps | 1
Cleaned | 0

Built in 130 ms
Watching for changes in …My Site{archetypes,assets,content,data,layouts,static,themes}
Watching for config changes in …My Site\config.toml
Environment: “development”
Serving pages from memory
Web Server is available at http://localhost:1313/ (bind address 127.0.0.1)
Press Ctrl+C to stop

Change detected, rebuilding site.
2023-02-11 19:35:12.794 +1100
Source changed WRITE “…My Site\content\contact\_index.md”
Total in 22 ms

2

that’s how browsers behave sometimes. What is not refreshing correctly exactly?

If its style, add fingerprinting to your CSS if the CSS is cached

{{ $style := resources.Get "css/style.css" | minify | fingerprint }}
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ $style.Permalink }}" media='all' fetchpriority="highest">
3

I’m changing the text content on a page so I don’t think fingerprinting helps here. I’ve changed the front matter, the body, partials. I’ve tested with Chrome and Edge and I see the same behaviour.

4

Sometimes, some specific changes, like some front matter will require hugo to be re-run, in other instances you just need to look into adjusting your browser toyour needs. Incognito/privacy window or disabling coach as you already figured out.

5

For example, changing the weight of a page in the front matter requires a Hugo restart if the menu is ordered by weight. Or at least it did here with the book theme. YMMV.