Proper way to serve updated files without user refreshing on nginx - django

Question

This is a pretty core question. I have a django app that I run in an nginx/gunicorn configuration. Nginx is responsible for proxying to gunicorn, but it also serves the static files of the project directly.
The issue is, when I update the static files, the browser doesn't load the latest version. Sometimes a refresh fixes it, but sometimes it requires clearing the cache. (I should mention I'm using require.js, which does not help).
To alleviate this issue I'm doing this trick:
VERSION = '2.03'
STATIC_URL = '/static/' + VERSION + '/'
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR + '/static/' + VERSION + '/'
This way, when I change static files, I simply bump the version. But for various reasons, I need to stop doing this. Is there a way to configure nginx to better serve updated static files when they are available?
I'm just not sure if the browser or nginx is to blame.
Update: Here's my nginx configuration with the comments removed:
upstream mycoolsite_server {
server unix:/webapps/mycoolsite/run/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.mycoolsite.com;
return 301 http://mycoolsite.com$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name mycoolsite.com 42.42.42.42;
client_max_body_size 4G;
access_log /webapps/mycoolsite/logs/nginx-access.log;
error_log /webapps/mycoolsite/logs/nginx-error.log;
location /static/ {
alias /webapps/mycoolsite/site/static/;
}
location /media/ {
alias /webapps/mycoolsite/site/media/;
}
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect off;
if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://mycoolsite_server;
break;
}
}
# Error pages
error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
location = /500.html {
root /webapps/mycoolsite/site/static/;
}
}

Answer 1

You can set expire for the static files in nginx configuration. For example if you don't want to cache css, js and png files. you can define sth. like:
location ~* \.(css|js|png)$ {
expires 0;
break;
}
so they won't been cached. But i assume you are making ./manage.py collectstatic after you change your static files on your repository or dev. environment.