ddrboxman/hasherator

Hasherator is a tool for Go web applications that solves a common annoyance: when you update a CSS or JavaScript file, browsers keep showing visitors the old version because they've cached it locally. Instead of asking users to hard-refresh their browser or manually bumping version numbers every time you change a stylesheet, this package automatically renames your asset files with a unique hash based on their contents. When a file changes, its hash changes, and the browser treats it as a brand-new file and fetches the fresh copy. At a high level, when your application starts up, you point the tool at a source directory containing your original files. It creates a separate working directory, copies each file over, and appends a hash string to the filename, so a file like bootstrap.min.css becomes something like bootstrap.min-ec3bb52a00e176a7181d454dffaea219.css. It also builds a lookup map that ties original filenames to their hashed versions, so your application's templates can reference the correct hashed name without you hardcoding it. This is meant for developers building Go web backends who serve static assets like stylesheets and scripts. If you run a blog, a SaaS dashboard, or any web app where you frequently tweak frontend files, this handles the cache-busting problem automatically. Your project repository keeps the clean, original filenames, while the hashed working directory is ignored by version control. A notable feature is the ability to update assets at runtime without restarting your server. By pairing it with a file-watching library, you can detect when someone modifies a stylesheet and automatically re-hash the files in the background, swapping in the new directory seamlessly. This means a content update or styling tweak can go live without any downtime.