[Rails] 3.1 asset pipeline + Capistrano troubles

Check out the guide on pre-compiling:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#precompiling-assets

The default matcher for compiling files includes application.js,
application.css and all files that do not end in js or css

If you have other manifests or individual stylesheets and JavaScript files
to include, you can add them to the precompile array:
config.assets.precompile += ['admin.js', 'admin.css', 'swfObject.js']

Thanks to you

Thanks Tim. Perhaps theres something I'm missing...

- Do plain CSS/JS files need to go through pre-compilation? And if so, do
they really have to be manually specified in application config?
- Shouldn't Rails' stylesheet_link_tag helper be looking in
/vendor/assets/stylesheets as well as public/assets/stylesheets?

The error I get in production is: ActionView::Template::Error (bootstrap.css
isn't precompiled)

Surely bootstrap.css will never be precompiled and end up in public/assets
if it's just plain old CSS?

Thanks again

config.serve_static_assets = true

in production.rb

I think this is a really bad idea. With this setting, the assets are served
from the _rails_ server (running ruby code) while these are static files
(with cache buster names) that can be server much more efficiently
directly by the web server from the public/assets/ file system.

From:

http://spreecommerce.com/documentation/server_configuration.html

"...config.serve_static_assets = true

There is a good reason why this is disabled by default in Rails which is
that Rails is not a general purpose web server. Servers such as Apache and
Nginx are optimized for rapidly serving up static content. You should
consider the advice of the Rails core team and let your webserver do what it
does best (as described in the next section.) "

Peter

Agreed. I must say this is *extremely* confusing. There seem to be no decent
explanations in the docs or anywhere else. Why
would config.serve_static_assets need changing to be true when we are told
"Apache or nginx will already do this"? Should I actually be setting up
Nginx to serve the files in the vendor/assets directory? I don't know how
this would work when the helper appears to believe it's going to find
bootstrap.css in public/assets/.

* Adding "*= require bootstrap"
to app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss
* making sure precompilation (bundle exec rake asset:precompile) happens
at the time of deployment

will produce a single application-cache-buster.css file in publis/assets/
where the
web server expects to find it.

As a simple reference, this is the commit where I activated bootstrap
working with the
asset pipeline:

https://github.com/petervandenabeele/base_app/commit/d866a356abb8d07d9d782065573272a6ce45c981

HTH,

Peter

If you include the bootstrap in .css form (e.g.
from arunagw/css-bootstrap-rails as I have done),
It is not "precompiled" in the sense of LESS, but there is some processing
in that the
bootstrap.css is joined with my customer .css and some whitespace is removed
in a single file:

application-c77014c7bfe7a5dbbc172cd8a685b53a.css

So for the aspect of removing the _number_ of asset files, there is
certainly some processing
that is done.

Peter

If you have config.assets.compile set to true (typical for development) the
stylesheet_link_tag will attempt to look in your app/assets directory and
compile the css file if necessary. But the stylesheet_link_tag doesn't look
outside public/assets in when config.assets.compile is set to false (which
is typical for production). Actually, it reads from the manifest.yml to
determine which file path to return.

When an asset is precompiled, it gets put into the public/assets directory
and an entry is put in manifest.yml like so:

application.css: application-ccb8034635849c44627859332fda6a01.css

When you use stylesheet_link_tag("application") in production, it checks to
see if an entry exists in manifest.yml with that name. if so, it returns the
hashed filename specified in the manifest. Otherwise it would just return
the unhashed file name like "assets/application.css"

So one option is to add bootstrap.css to config.assets.precompile. This
will in fact send it through the pipeline and dump it in public/assets with
the name bootstrap-digest.css and put an entry in manifest.yml.

However, plain CSS files don't really *need *to be pre-compiled since they
don't contain SASS/ERB. If it doesn't need to be compiled, you can just put
them directly in public/assets without adding it to config.assets.precompile
and you're done.

So to sum it up: in production, all assets need to be under public/assets.
How they get there depends on whether they need to be pre-processed or not.

Hopefully that's not too confusing. It sounds complicated but once you
understand what's going on it's really kind of nifty.

Thanks Tim - that has definitely cleared it up in my mind. It's a shame it's
not explained like this in the Rails guide. I never had this much trouble
when I was just using Jammit before Rails 3.1 :)

This should be expanded to:

/* comment
*= require_self
*= require_tree .
*= require bootstrap
*/

Peter

Yes this can be but

config.assets.manifest = '/path/to/some/other/location'

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Peter Vandenabeele
wrote: