Flush Agent doesnt clear proxy clientlib paths

Question

I am using AEM 6.3 and using allowProxy for clientlibs. As expected dispatcher caches the clientlibs under path /cache/etc.clientlibs/myapp/clientlibs/clientlib.css. But corresponding jcr path will be /apps/myapp/clientlibs/clientlib/mystyle.css

So when clientlibs are modified during deployment, and published, they wont clear respective apache cache automatically. Today we are doing this manually. Plus we use automated cache buster VersionedClientlibs. So we never end up loading obsolete clientlib. But apache cache gets piled up with 1000s of obsolete clientlib files if manual clearance is not done.

What is the recommended approach to clear obsolete clientlibs at apache that is versioned and proxy allowed?

Answer 1

This a known limitation, and we've also been flushing the whole /etc.clientlib path after each deployment. we do this via ACS dispatcher-flush-ui.

Typically, when deploying to production, you'd flush the whole or part of the dispatcher cache anyway to make sure component changes reflect. So adding this task to that process is easy.

If you really want this to become an automatic process, you can:

1. Write a ResourceChangeListener example here or a a JCR EventListener example: here. And basically listen for changes at the clientlib path and replicate the corresponding /etc.clientlibs/ path
2. Write a ReplicationPathTransformer so that when a your clientlib path is replicated, you can transform it to the corresponding /etc.clientlib/ path to be flushed in dispatcher.

Hope this helps.