I ran into some caching issue with php/apache on ubuntu server. I use AWS CodeDeploy to replace the whole /var/www/html with the git repo, code is updated in EC2, but browser does not reflect the change after deployment. However if I went into the file (let's say index.tpl) and add a random letter, I could then see the change. Also it works when I modify the target file and update only it via sftp client like filezilla. What happened?
Check which commit CodeDeploy is deploying. It may be pinned to an older commit.
its mostly opcache! you would need to flush it. have you tried doing a reload on apache to see if the changes apply?
I figured it out. Culprit was Smarty. Force compiling needs to be enabled.