Serving a status 304 with Express

[Dan Phiffer]

Hi all,

Forgive me if I'm missing something blindingly obvious, but say I use a minimum example like this:

var express = require('express');
var app = express.createServer();
app.configure(function() {
app.use(express.static(__dirname, { maxAge: 31557600000 }));
});
app.listen(3000);

... and then I invoke it like this:

NODE_ENV=production node app.js

And then I load it up like this:

http://localhost:3000/app.js

I would expect that when reloading the file I'd get a 304 status instead of 200. The cache-control, last-modified, and etag headers are present in the response, and look reasonable to me, but the browser refuses to send an if-modified-since request header.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,
-Dan

[Mark Nottingham]

Can you paste in a copy of the response?

What does <http://redbot.org/> say about the URL?

Cheers,

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[Nicolas Chambrier]

Beware the way you refresh. How and with what browser?

[Dan Phiffer]

On Aug 21, 2011, at 11:18 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Can you paste in a copy of the response?

GET /test.js HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Express
Content-Length: 241
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31557600
Last-Modified: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:00:37 GMT
Etag: "241-1314014437000"
Content-Type: application/javascript
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: keep-alive

> What does <http://redbot.org/> say about the URL?

It says it needs a Date header -- "Responses without a Date aren't allowed to have Expires or Last-Modified values."

Thanks,
-Dan

[Dan Phiffer]

I've tried with Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, all with the same result. Going with Cmd-R for refresh here, no shift key.

[Dan Phiffer]

Yep, it was the Date header. Adding this to line 159 of Connect's static.js middleware gives me 304s --

res.setHeader('Date', new Date().toString());