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While searching for some connect middleware to handle generating a cache manifest, I discovered that the CacheManifest middleware had been removed from the 1.0 release of Connect. I'm not sure why that is, but it inspired me to create a new one.


  npm install connect-offline

What It Does

connect-offline simply compiles the arguments you pass into a properly formatted cache manifest file. The main convenience it provides is automatically making sure the cache gets re-downloaded by the browser when you update the files that are being cached. This is done using the modified-at timestamps on the files.


manifest_path is the url you want to serve your cache manifest from. This should match the manifest attribute of your html tag. For example: <html manifest="example.appcache">

networks is a simple array of values for the NETWORK section of the manifest.

fallbacks is an object to populate the FALLBACK section of the manifest. Its keys become the urls to handle while its values represent the redirects for those urls.

files expects an array of objects describing directories of files to add to the cache. See below for an example.

use_fs_watch is a boolean that indicates whether or not you want node to call on each file you are including in the cache manifest with a callback that will update the "cache buster" timestamp when any of those files change. You might want to use this option to ease development - you won't have to restart your server process every time you change a file and want browsers to download the new cache manifest. See the tests for more info.

Check It Out

Given a directory structure:

├── app.js
└── public
    ├── css
    │   └── style.css
    └── js
        └── hello.js

And this

  offline = require('connect-offline')
  app = require('connect').createServer()
    manifest_path: "/application.manifest"
    files: [
      { dir: '/public/css', prefix: '/css/' },
      { dir: '/public/js', prefix: '/js/' }
  app.listen 3590

You'll get an application.manifest that looks like this:

  # Wed, 22 Aug 2012 03:24:19 GMT

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