Using workbox runtime caching, requests are not showing on cache storage on chrome

Question

I am using workbox runtime caching to cache external calls (materialize.css is one of those). In my network tab it shows that the request is coming from serviceWorker (looks fine):

But on cache storage my runtime cache looks empty:

You can see my service worker on chromes's application tab, and this is the website: https://quack.surge.sh/

Service worker code:

const workboxSW = new self.WorkboxSW();
workboxSW.precache(fileManifest);
workboxSW.router.registerNavigationRoute("/index.html");workboxSW.router.registerRoute(/^https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/dc3dnmmpx\/image\/upload\/.*/, workboxSW.strategies.cacheFirst({}), 'GET');
workboxSW.router.registerRoute('https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/materialize/0.100.2/css/materialize.min.css', workboxSW.strategies.cacheFirst({}), 'GET');
workboxSW.router.registerRoute('https://res.cloudinary.com/dc3dnmmpx/image/upload/(.*)', workboxSW.strategies.cacheFirst({}), 'GET');

Is this the expected behaviour? I'm pretty new to service workers and I am not sure what is the correct result.

Koehn

Answer 1

The underlying issue is that those are opaque responses, and by default, they won't be used with a cacheFirst strategy.

There's some background at https://workboxjs.org/how_tos/cdn-caching.html

There's logging in Workbox to help debug this sort of thing, but as it's noisy, it's not enabled by default in the production build. Either switching your importScripts() to use the development build (e.g. importScripts('https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/build/importScripts/workbox-sw.dev.v2.0.3.js'), or going in to DevTools and explicitly setting workbox.LOG_LEVEL = 'debug' would give you a log message like the following:

You have a few options for getting things working as you expect:

• Change to workboxSW.strategies.staleWhileRevalidate(), which supports opaque response by default.
• Tell the cacheFirst strategy that you're okay with it using opaque responses: workboxSW.strategies.cacheFirst({cacheableResponse: {statuses: [0, 200]}})
• Because your third-party CDNs all seem to support CORS, you could opt-in to CORS mode for your CSS and image requests via the crossorigin attribute, and the responses will no longer be opaque: <img src='https://cors.example.com/path/to/image.jpg' crossorigin='anonymous'> or <link rel='stylesheet' href='https://cors.example.com/path/to/styles.css' crossorigin='anonymous'>

Kirman

Thank you very much for your response, I didn't know about opaque responses. Workbox documentation is very short in my opinion, so it is hard to debug these kind of issues. Thanks again. – Koehn

be careful to run into quota problems, when allowing the opaque (http 0) respones to be cached – Nablus

Thanks, the background link seems to have been moved to developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/guides/… – Ceratoid