Caching

Shelf applies caching headers to optimize delivery of static assets.

Immutable Assets

VitePress generates CSS and JavaScript files with content hashes in their filenames (e.g., style.a1b2c3d4.css). These files never change — if the content changes, the filename changes too.

Shelf detects these hashed filenames and serves them with aggressive cache headers:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable

This tells browsers and CDNs to cache these files for one year without revalidation.

HTML Files

HTML files are served without explicit cache headers, meaning browsers will revalidate on each request. This ensures users always see the latest content after a new version is deployed.

LLM Files

llms.txt and llms-full.txt are plain text files served with default caching behavior, similar to HTML files.