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kotlinlang

With Ruby on Rails, it is common to <https://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#what-is-fingerprinting-and-why-should-i-care-questionmark|fingerprint your assets> (images, CSS, javascript) with a hash.  If the file contents change, the hash changes, which busts browser and CDN caches.

Has anyone tried doing this with Gradle+Ktor server applications?

If you use the `CachingHeaders` plugin (<https://ktor.io/docs/caching.html|documentation>), Ktor adds the HTTP caching headers to all requests to static files, so there is no need to add hashes

I don’t think that solves the same problem, does it?

Oops, it's the `ConditionalHeader` plugin that enables this functionality, sorry (<https://ktor.io/docs/conditional-headers.html|documentation>)

I still don’t think that fully solves the issue.

But if I’m sitting behind CloudFlare or another CDN, then doesn’t this still require visiting the origin for every request?

Even if the request doesn’t return content.

Indeed. You could greatly minimize it by using `CachingHeaders` as well.