Clearing your brower's cache after a Koha upgrade

by Melissa Lefebvre on Nov 3, 2014

You may have heard us say to clear your browser’s cache after each Koha upgrade or we may have asked you to clear the cache to resolve a Koha error and wondered why? Why do we always tell you to do this? Well your browsers cache copies web data and elements from pages that you visit and stores them on your machine. By remembering this data, your browser is able to quickly return the page back to you the next time you visit which increases the page’s load time (and we all know how slow websites annoy us).

Now because Koha is web based, the code could (and usually does) change from version to version. So when your site gets upgraded, your browser will still pull up it’s saved information (as it should to increase the load time) but that old information will conflict with the new information causing oddities with Koha. For example, your site just got upgraded and you haven’t cleared your cache, you go to checkout a patron, wand the barcode in as you always have done and the screen jumps and you are now doing a search in the catalog. ???? That makes no sense. This happens because something changed with the code somewhere and your browser is tying to do what it thinks it should do but the server is saying “huh, that makes no sense so I’m just going to do this instead‚Äù. Once you clear your cache, and navigate back to the page, Koha works as intended. So by clearing the cache, you remove the old stored page data and replace it with the current page data. It is good to get into the habit of clearing your browser’s cache on a regular basis not just for Koha but for other sites that may have changed their code or revamped their website.