Rails and Nginx: Overwritten images not reloaded

Question

I have a web server with Nginx and Passenger.

I have uploaded my rails app and got it running. Everything was great, but then I decided to change an image (overwrite it with another one). I did that, and then deployed again. I have verified that the new image was at the assets/images folder.

The problem is that I refreshed the web app, and the html was referencing the old image. It was like this, until I restarted nginx. Isn't any other way to reloading this? Because if i have multiple web app on the same server, I don't want to restarting them all just because I updated one web assets.

My nginx conf:

server {
    # Path to ruby version
    passenger_ruby /home/ubuntu/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1/wrappers/ruby;

    listen       80;
    server_name mydomain.com;
    passenger_enabled on;
    root /var/www/myrailsapp/current/public;
    rails_env production;

    location ~ ^/assets/ {
       expires 1y;
       add_header Cache-Control public;

       add_header ETag "";
       break;
    }

    location ~* .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {
      expires 365d;
    }


    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   html;
    }

Do you know what is the problem and how can I avoid to restart nginx for reloading the new image?

Answer 1

Instead of restarting nginx, just restart passenger:

touch <app_dir>/tmp/restart.txt