How to Delete a Service Worker

Surprisingly, if you want to completely remove a service worker from a website, you need more than deleting the file on your server. Explanations below.

When I decided to make full use Ghost as my CMS (Content Management System), I had to reimplement some features that I previously programmed. As I wanted to quickly ship this new version into production, I chose to skip some features that I might add again in the future. One of these features was that my website was a Progressive Web App (better known as a PWA).

PWA uses Service Workers, a small JavaScript file that provides certain features like an offline experience to users. Unfortunately for me, the service worker is cached by the browser and if I deleted that file, the service workers installed on my visitors' browsers would not be updated because the file would result in a 404 error page.

Simply replace your service-worker.js (or sw.js) file and the next time a user visits your website, the service worker on its navigator will self-destruct! 💥

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