Investigate occasional missing frontend assets after deploys

GitLab team members have noticed that occasionally, after the Docs site deploys to GitLab Pages, it's missing frontend assets, or it's throwing JavaScript errors due to some files being new and some being from the last deploy.

To a visitor, this looks like missing search forms, missing global nav, missing tabs on the homepage, missing table of contents, a missing a Versions menu, or missing styles/fonts.

After a few minutes, something syncs back up, and the site looks fine. It doesn't happen after every deploy, and the length of how long it takes to resolve has varied (longest I've seen was ~12 minutes on 4/30).

This doesn't seem like a bug with the website itself, but rather something caused by cache behavior in Pages.

Related

• Slack thread in #gitlab-pages (internal): https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C1BSEQ138/p1746025115398279
  • Links from the thread
    • https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/pages/#gitlab-api-cache-configuration
    • https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/pages/#zip-cache-refresh-example
    • gitlab-org/gitlab-pages#757
• Parallel-deployed review apps throw 404s immedi... (gitlab-org/gitlab-pages#1140 - closed) • Unassigned
• !624 (merged) (attempted workaround, which did not resolve the issue)

Issue reports via Slack (internal only)

• Direct message (4/2/25 @ 1:26pm CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1743618694081939 (4/2/25 @ 1:31pm CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C16HYA2P5/p1745512004587219 (4/24/25 @ 11:26am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CCB575BGT/p1746024621549149 (4/30/25 @ 9:50am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1746025016396769 (4/30/25 @ 9:56am CDT)
• Direct message (5/1/25 @ 10:18am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CDWGE0DDY/p1749218421190829 (6/6/25 @ 9:00am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1755617291888839 (8/19/25 @ 10:28am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1755793014334479 (8/21/25 @ 11:16am CDT)
• DM, 8/21/25 @ 4:31pm CDT
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C16HYA2P5/p1757606807966639 (9/11/25 @ 11:06am CDT)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1762453848479399 (11/6/25 @ 12:30pm CST)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1763001947721229 (11/12/25 @ 8:45pm CST)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C16HYA2P5/p1763658810447839 (11/20/25 @ 11:13am CST)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C16HYA2P5/p1763664072154119 (11/20/25 @ 12:41pm CST)
• https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CETG54GQ0/p1764613295438309 (12/1/25 @ 12:21pm CST)