Laravel and view caching in development -- can't see changes right away

Question

Some friends and I decided to start working on a project and we came across Laravel and thought it might be a good tool. We started using it locally to develop out some of our pages and noticed something strange.

When we update a view with different information, it would take almost 5 to 10 minutes before the views information would change. It's like Laravel is caching the view and put a TTL on it.

I know this isn't anything I am doing on my local web server because I have used other frameworks and I have never encountered this issue.

Upon searching the Internet, I can't find a great answer on how to disable this. I want to use Laravel, but find it worthless if it takes a while for my views to update each time I want to make a change. In fact, it sounds counter productive.

Is there any way to disable this? Why are my views taking forever to update right out of the box?

Answer 1

The #laravel IRC channel is a God send. This had nothing to do with Laravel's behavior at all. This was actually something PHP 5.5 was doing.

The reason this was so baffling is because I upgraded my PHP version from 5.3 and never had this issue.

In your .ini file, you need to tweak your OPcache settings. For me, these settings began at line 1087 in the .ini file and looked something like this:

opcache.memory_consumption=128 opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8 opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000 opcache.revalidate_freq=60 opcache.fast_shutdown=1 opcache.enable_cli=1 

Take particular note of the opcache.revalidate_freq=60. This is what is actually making your views cache. If this is not the desired behavior, set the value to 0 and your views will update every time you make a change. Yay!

EDIT AUGUST 21, 2014

As mentioned by Matt below, make sure to restart your web server to see your changes take effect after you have changed your .ini file.

Answer 2

With newer versions of PHP, opcache doesn't work. This is what I use (in app/filters.php):

App::before(function($request) {     // Clear view cache in sandbox (only) with every request     if (App::environment() == 'sandbox') {         $cachedViewsDirectory=app('path.storage').'/views/';         $files = glob($cachedViewsDirectory.'*');         foreach($files as $file) {             if(is_file($file)) {                 @unlink($file);             }         }     } });