Minimal viable service worker

The thing is, every website is different. So the service worker strategy for every website needs to be different too.

Still, I was wondering if it would be possible to create a service worker script that would work for most websites. Here's the script I came up with.

The logic works like this:

• If there's a request for an HTML page, fetch it from the network and store a copy in a cache (but if the network request fails, try looking in the cache instead).
• For any other files, look for a copy in the cache first but meanwhile fetch a fresh version from the network to update the cache (and if there's no existing version in the cache, fetch the file from the network and store a copy of it in the cache).

So HTML files are served network-first, while all other files are served cache-first, but in both cases a fresh copy is always put in the cache. The idea is that HTML content will always be fresh (unless there's a problem with the network), while all other content—images, style sheets, scripts—might be slightly stale, but get refreshed with every request.

My original attempt was riddled with errors. Jake came to my rescue and we revised the script into something that actually worked. In the process, my misunderstanding of how await works led Jake to write a great blog post on await vs return vs return await.

I got there in the end and the script seems solid enough. It's a fairly simplistic strategy that could work for quite a few sites, but it has some issues...

Service workers don't perform any automatic cleanup of caches—that's up to you to do (usually during the activate event). This script doesn't do any cleanup so the cache might grow and grow and grow. For that reason, I think the script is best suited for fairly small sites.

The strategy also assumes that a file will either be fetched from the network or the cache. There's no contingency for when both attempts fail. So there's no fallback offline page, for example.

I decided to test it in the wild, but I expanded it slightly to fix the fallback issue. The version on the Ampersand 2018 website includes a worst-case-scenario option to show a custom offline page that has been pre-cached. (By the way, if you haven't got a ticket for Ampersand yet, get a ticket now—it's going to be superb day of web typography nerdery.)

Anyway, this fairly basic script seems to be delivering some good performance improvements. If you've got a site that you think would benefit from this network/caching strategy, and it's served over HTTPS, then:

1. Feel free to download the script or copy and paste it into a file called serviceworker.js,
2. Put that file in the root directory of your website,
3. Add this in a script element at the bottom of your HTML pages:

if (navigator.serviceWorker && !navigator.serviceWorker.controller) { navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js'); }

You can also use the script as a starting point. You might find issues specific to your particular website. That's okay—you can tweak and adjust the script to suit your needs.

If this minimal service worker script proves in any way useful to you, thank Jake.

This was originally published on my own site.