Disabling file cacheing on the server using htaccess

Recently I've been testing our web app tools locally using MAMP. These apps eventually end up making changes to files in the file system. I've been finding however that the changes are regularly not picked up in the browser until I empty the browser cache. This is kind of irritating as you can imagine.

The solution was to define a .htaccess file in the directory containing the editable content files that prevents browser cacheing. Obviously make sure this is only used locally during testing! This also requires the Apache module mod_headers - MAMP 1.9.4 (and probably other versions too) include this by default.

# when in local mode, never caches anything in this folder. 
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT"
</IfModule>

Adapted from here:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/using-http-headers-with-htaccess.html