Asset Versioning

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Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 7.3 (the current stable version).

Tired of deploying and having browser's cache the old version of your assets? By calling enableVersioning(), each filename will now include a hash that changes whenever the contents of that file change (e.g. app.123abc.js instead of app.js). This allows you to use aggressive caching strategies (e.g. a far future Expires) because, whenever a file change, its hash will change, ignoring any existing cache:

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        // webpack.config.js
// ...

Encore
    .setOutputPath('web/build/')
    // ...
+     .enableVersioning()
    

To link to these assets, Encore creates two files entrypoints.json and manifest.json.

Loading Assets from `entrypoints.json` & `manifest.json`

Whenever you run Encore, two configuration files are generated: entrypoints.json and manifest.json. Each file is similar, and contains a map to the final, versioned filename.

The first file - entrypoints.json - is used by the encore_entry_script_tags() and encore_entry_link_tags() Twig helpers. If you're using these, then your CSS and JavaScript files will render with the new, versioned filename. If you're not using Symfony, your app will need to read this file in a similar way.

The manifest.json file is only needed to get the versioned filename of other files, like font files or image files (though it also contains information about the CSS and JavaScript files):

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        {
    "build/app.js": "/build/app.123abc.js",
    "build/dashboard.css": "/build/dashboard.a4bf2d.css",
    "build/images/logo.png": "/build/images/logo.3eed42.png"
}
    

In your app, you need to read this file if you want to be able to link (e.g. via an img tag) to certain assets. If you're using Symfony, just activate the json_manifest_file versioning strategy in config.yml:

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        # app/config/config.yml
framework:
    # ...
    assets:
        # feature is supported in Symfony 3.3 and higher
        json_manifest_path: '%kernel.project_dir%/web/build/manifest.json'
    

That's it! Just be sure to wrap each path in the Twig asset() function like normal:

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        <img src="{{ asset('build/images/logo.png') }}" alt="ACME logo">
    

Troubleshooting