Specific Image Not Loading After Rails 7 ESBuilt Update - ruby-on-rails

I have a very frustrating issue with a Rails 7 app after migrating to Ruby 3.2 with Esbuild.
Basically there is a few specific images that simply will not load, however, there are many others that load just fine that live in the same location, and are accessed the exact same way. It's driving me nuts.
I have cleared cached, restarted servers, cleared all the local build files, everything I can think of. This is also happening in both dev and production.
My Esbuild is running just fine, it is finding the files and compiling them with a finger print. The files all exist and are in the right location. (all sitting under app/assets/builds)
Accessing the file direcly in the browser, ie
http://localhost:4000/assets/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png
Fails with a 404, cannot find the image. This file however exists with the correct name in the app/assets/builds folder.
Accessing another image from the page ie
http://localhost:4000/assets/leadstory-symbol-B5T7OIJB.png
Loads just fine.
It's almost like there is a static list of rails routes that match the images and it is not generating the route for some of these specific images, hence the 404, even though the file exists.
Some screenshots that highlight the odd behaviour
and the files listed in the directory, showing the file clearly exists
My package.json build step is
esbuild app/javascript/bundles/*.* --bundle --sourcemap --outdir=app/assets/builds --public-path=/assets --minify --log-limit=0 --loader:.js=jsx --loader:.png=file --loader:.svg=file
And a snip from the app of how its being loaded.
import LogoWhiteTrans from "../../assets/images/logo_white_trans.png";
<img src={LogoWhiteTrans} className="logo" alt="logo" />
Which looks to be working fine, the HTML outputs
<img src="/assets/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png" class="logo" alt="logo">
The image can be loaded fine, from elsewhere in the app in a regular rails view using asset helpers (not from within the React app)
ie <%= asset_path('logo_white_trans.png') %>
Something I have noticed is in the logs, I see
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png"):
Notice there it does not say "/assets/logo_white_trans..."? I thought that was weird, as the URL in the image tag clearly has a /assets at the start. Trying either path does not work, with or without /assets directly in the browser. Just seems odd rails would see it that way
Im going nuts here, what am I missing. Its not a png specific issue, as other pngs are loading fine in the same way, nor is it an image issue the file exists and the naming is fine.
Is there some sort of manifest thats not being updated? An internal asset route list or something along those lines?
Im running Rails 7
Ruby 3.2
ESBuild

This isn't really an answer, but what I have ended up doing is moving all image assets out of the asset pipeline and into the public folder. I noticed that my assets were being duplicated by esbuilt and the rails asset precompile process, and basically the javascript build and rails eco system just do not work well together.
For anyone else having issues like this, we've just moved all our static assets in the public/images folder and we refernce the path /images/blah.png the same way in both React and Ruby now.
All image tags in either React or standard .erb views are just <img src="/images/blah.png/>. Its a lot cleaner.
Yes, we have given up asset finger printing, but its a small loss, considering most images never change and It's dramatically simplified things and sped up our build process considerably as it does not have to touch each file during precompilation.
Our views now also just have standard tags, instead of <asset_path> tags, which im sure is just quicker in general instead of ruby generating these asset strings all the time.
So, not really and answer to the initial question but it is a solution, and one i think anyone who is fusing modern javascript, react, typescript etc into a Rails app.

Related

Rails 6 - Should I put my CSS & JS in rails asset pipeline or webpacker or through Amazon Cloudfront? Which is the most efficient?

I use to host my CSS files in the rails asset pipeline and JS on webpacker. I recently realize my webpage has been loading slower and slower.
I ran Chrome lighthouse on my site and found that my CSS and JS assets are "render-blocking resources" and causing my page to load slower.
I've already tried moving all of my CSS and JS over to webpacker (semantic-ui css is still being imported by the rails asset pipeline, had lots of problems trying to make this work but couldnt still)
I notice on Chrome lighthouse that my load time improved marginally, I guess its from the minification of CSS and JS by webpacker but it's no where near the improvements I was looking for.
So my question here is, what is the most efficient method to serve CSS and JS files for rails app?
My app is hosted on Heroku's Hobby Tier.. could this be a factor as well?
Both approaches should allow you to achieve similar results. I don't know rails asset pipeline, but if it's used similarly to webpack it just changes your files on the build time & it's up to you how much code the user gets to download.
First of all, you can check the output size - in webpack, you can check the build standard output, or directly check the files it creates.
One trap you could be failing into with webpack is to have it set up wrongly. It could anything, from not minimizing code when for production build to having loades set up in a way that makes your images included directly inside js as data URL.
One advantage of using webpack, is that allows you to set up more complicated loading logic - for example lazy loading. Here something more about lazy load:
https://dev.to/marcinwosinek/lazy-load-library-in-application-build-with-webpack-5757

Less compiler doesn't update css file after LESS code is updated

This is way beyond my knowledge..
I was migrating my rails 3 application from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 3. I downloaded Bootstrap 3 and FontAwesome, put them into my assets folder. Then I tried to modify the font path. I change #FontAwesomePath in font-awesome/variables.less several times, however it still don't points to the correct path. (I put font files in ./app/assets/fonts/font-awesome/)
#FontAwesomePath: "fonts/font-awesome"
It's ok, cuz I saw the line below this one is a cdn path to font files:
//#FontAwesomePath: "//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/3.2.1/font"; // for referencing Bootstrap CDN font files directly
I uncomment this line, everything seems fine. The compiled css file load the font from cdn and all icons are displaying.
Then I delete this line, try to point #FontAwesomePath back to local server again. STRANGE thing happened! No matter what I did, the compiled css file points it to the CDN path! I tried to clear browser cache, reboot rails server (I was using development mode of rails server), even to load the website from other computers, nothing changes. It insisting point #FontAwesomePath to the CDN path even no where in the whole application code exists the url! I can only image there is some kind of variable cache in less compiler. Can anybody tell me what's happened inside this? It's driven me crazy.
edit: I'm using less gem (v 2.3.2), which includes lesscss v 1.3.3.
I had issues with CSS updates, these where only solved by going to tmp > cache and deleting the assets folder then restarting the server. The CSS was then updated.
Hope this helps.
Steph

image_path always uses assets/ when I want just public/images

Why does image_path insist on appending assets/ to the front of image paths that are stored in public/images?
I'm building a photographer's website, so naturally we want photos to be in it, including a random sub-selection of some photos to be shown as part of the layout. Further, I've built a super-simple gallery that just displays all photos. Those image files are stored in:
public/images/gallery
I've gotten an ImageMagick gem to shrink them to the desired size. Those small files are stored in:
public/images/gallery/sm/
The shrinking is done on page load as part of rendering the layout ERB. I know it might initially sound awful, but it only shrinks an image once, and the lazy-shrinking means we don't have to restart the server to add new photos (which he'd want to do).
My reading suggests that the asset pipeline is for static layout stuff, but this is more dynamic than that. I'm led to believe that public/images is where this stuff should go, especially since production-mode Rails complains that the generated thumbnails are not compiled.
Enter the problem: I place those images in the paths shown above, and image_path gives back what looks like an asset pipeline path. It doesn't even work when I flatten the subdirectories and have everything live in public/images.
My workaround is to build the tag manually. So is image_path (and by extension, image_tag) only for asset pipeline stuff? Am I supposed to construct tags from strings for public images? I've also found mentions that image_path is supposed to look in public for a matching file first, but I've also seen documentation (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/AssetTagHelper.html) claiming that it won't verify the existence of something it returns a path for.
Edit: error in original answer
Rails asset pipeline is for serving assets that are present when the application starts. For serving dynamic assets as you suggest there's this answer to a similar question: Rails 3.1 assets not recognizing new images uploaded by rmagick until server restart which answers far better than my answer just did.
Having searched around to improve on my first answer, I think the best solution to the image_tag creation then is to create your own image_tag-like helper. Perhaps:
def public_image_path(filename)
[your path to that file]
end
def public_image_tag(filename, options={})
image_tag(public_image_path(filename), options)
end

Rails with Twitter Bootstrap: still serving an old asset

Going nuts here. I'm developing a rails app, and I'm using the twitter-bootstrap-rails gem in order to include the Twitter Bootstrap styles in my app. This gem generates a file called 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' in app/assets/stylesheets, which I have been using to modify some of the bootstrap variables and include my own CSS overrides.
Everything has been working fine until today. For some reason, the changes I am making to this file today are getting saved to the file, but Rails is still serving the old version of the file! I've searched and found no precompiled versions of the file anywhere (nothing in public/assets)...only the one in assets/stylesheets which I have been modifying. Everything looks fine as far as the directories within the app go, but then when I start the rails server, load the page, and use the element inspector to look at the stylesheets, it's using an old version of 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' with rules that I have deleted. I've turned of the cache in my browser, and tried it in 4 different browsers too, so I'm pretty sure this isn't a result of browser caching.
The rails asset pipeline just seems to serving a version of the file that doesn't exist! Does anybody have any ideas why this might be happening?
Fixed it.
The asset pipeline was storing a cached version in tmp/cache.
I ran rake tmp:clear, which deleted all the files in there, and then rails served the version of *bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less* that I wanted.
Why the cached version suddenly stopped getting updated is beyond me. Arrghhhh!

Rails 3.1 and Image Assets

I have put all my images for my admin theme in the assets folder within a folder called admin. Then I link to it like normal ie.
# Ruby
image_tag "admin/file.jpg" .....
#CSS
.logo{ background:url('/assets/images/admin/logo.png');
FYI. Just for testing I am not using the asset_path tag just yet as I have not compiled my assets.
Ok all good so far until I decided to update an image. I replaced some colors but on reload the new styled image is not showing. If I view the image directly in the browser its still showing the old image. Going one step further I destroyed the admin images folder. But it has broken nothing all the images are still being displayed. And yes I have cleared my cache and have tried on multiple browsers.
Is there some sort of image caching going on? This is just local development using pow to serve the pages.
Even destroying the whole images folder the images are still being served.
Am I missing something?
In 3.1 you just get rid of the 'images' part of the path. So an image that lives in /assets/images/example.png will actually be accessible in a get request at this url - /assets/example.png
Because the assets/images folder gets generated along with a new 3.1 app, this is the convention that they probably want you to follow. I think that's where image_tag will look for it, but I haven't tested that yet.
Also, during the RailsConf keynote, I remember D2h saying the the public folder should not have much in it anymore, mostly just error pages and a favicon.
You'll want to change the extension of your css file from .css.scss to .css.scss.erb and do:
background-image:url(<%=asset_path "admin/logo.png"%>);
You may need to do a "hard refresh" to see changes. CMD+SHIFT+R on OSX browsers.
In production, make sure
rm -rf public/assets
bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production
happens upon deployment.
For what it's worth, when I did this I found that no folder should be include in the path in the css file. For instance if I have app/assets/images/example.png, and I put this in my css file...
div.example { background: url('example.png'); }
... then somehow it magically works. I figured this out by running the rake assets:precompile task, which just sucks everything out of all your load paths and dumps it in a junk drawer folder: public/assets. That's ironic, IMO...
In any case this means you don't need to put any folder paths, everything in your assets folders will all end up living in one huge directory. How this system resolves file name conflicts is unclear, you may need to be careful about that.
Kind of frustrating there aren't better docs out there for this big of a change.
In rails 4 you can now use a css and sass helper image-url:
div.logo {background-image: image-url("logo.png");}
If your background images aren't showing up consider looking at how you're referencing them in your stylesheets.
when referencing images in CSS or in an IMG tag, use image-name.jpg
while the image is really located under ./assets/images/image-name.jpg
http://railscasts.com/episodes/279-understanding-the-asset-pipeline
This railscast (Rails Tutorial video on asset pipeline) helps a lot to explain the paths in assets pipeline as well. I found it pretty useful, and actually watched it a few times.
The solution I chose is #Lee McAlilly's above, but this railscast helped me to understand why it works. Hope it helps!
The asset pipeline in rails offers a method for this exact thing.
You simply add image_path('image filename') to your css or scss file and rails takes care of everything. For example:
.logo{ background:url(image_path('admin/logo.png'));
(note that it works just like in a .erb view, and you don't use "/assets" or "/assets/images" in the path)
Rails also offers other helper methods, and there's another answer here: How do I use reference images in Sass when using Rails 3.1?

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