I'm starting a Rails 5 application with Bootstrap 3, I'm confused whether to go with gems like Bootstrap-Sass or use CDN from MaxCDN to rails application.css/js file. I don't plan to modify bootstrap styles, is there any added benefit in using gems other than modifying/mixin.
Using CDN versions should perform better than of gem ?
If I use CDN method there is added benefit of not loading styles/script if user already has it locally in browser ?
Is there any cons for using CDN links in Rails ?
I wouldn't say that there are any cons per se but there are subtle differences.
As you already pointed out, there's the advantage that - if it's a "popular" CDN - users may indeed not need to download the file. But that's a big "if".
On the other hand, a CDN can track users to your site because the resource requests contain a Referer header.
Personally my suggestion would be to serve all local assets via a CDN of your choice, configured via asset host as described in section 4.4.1 of the guides.
In that setup, you'll have the advantage of speedy asset delivery (no hit against your application server) and full control over the assets delivered.
Related
I want to add frameworks like AngularJS, Bootstrap and polymer JS into my rails app. Problem with the gems is they are unstable with new versions and they even stop developing gems(which leads to failing of one gem which depends on another)
So I just want to add those frameworks directly into the application root html file via CDN(offered by the vendor). Is that a good practice? Will it cause any future problems in production environment?
Yes, if you are using reliable CDN's (and those offered my vendors can be treat as one) it may even bring you some improvements in the production enviromnent, e.g.:
those assets will be often already cached on your user's machines
it circumvents browsers limit the number of concurrent connections from the same domain (as your app)
On the flip side, on your dev enviromnent you'll have to wait a liiitle bit more for the website to load those assets comparing it to loading them from localhost ;)
if you dont use CDN,you have much control over the assets ,as they might change/update or sometimes the url can be down :( in worst case scenario..so i suggest using local assets if there is large dependency and for small dependency ...you may use cdn. :)
use this to set up polymer js onlocal.
I am deploying a Rails 4.0 application which includes HTML partial templates as assets for our front-end javascript framework. Although these templates are part of the asset pipeline and are properly precompiled, when I call asset_path from embedded ruby in our js files, it returns the path to our templates without the fingerprint.
I am quite certain that this is purely a Asset Pipeline question, but to give you a complete sense of our tech stack: We use Rails 4.0, Ruby 2.1, AngularJS for our front-end MVC framework, and AssetSync to synchronize our assets between Rails and our CDN.
An example of where this occurs (in a file included in app/assets/application.js.erb:
$routeProvider
.when('/', {
templateUrl: "<%= asset_path 'home.html' %>",
controller: "HomeController"
});
This works great locally, but as soon as config.assets.digest = true in production, the call to asset_path does not properly factor in the fingerprint. The templates are in the app/assets directory within a new subdirectory templates. So in the above example, the home.html asset is at app/assets/templates/home.html. Our javascript has itself been precompiled at that point, so I'm thinking that it might be an issue of which order the assets are precompiled in.
I've noticed a few issues on the Rails Github (1, 2, 3) and a couple of SO posts about fingerprints not being set properly (1, 2), but can't find anything about them not being included at all...
Any help or ideas that you can provide would be much appreciated.
Edit 4/15: forgot to include that the extensions on my application javascript file DOES include .erb (app/assets/application.js.erb). Thanks Alex for catching that. I've updated it above.
Also, following instructions in this article on Heroku, I confirmed that running puts helper.asset_path("home.html") from within a Rails console running in production prints a properly fingerprinted URL for that asset.
This appears to be an issue with the AssetSync gem. I removed it, reconfigured the app so that Rails serves the assets, and the fingerprinting works fine.
If anyone else finds this question and is running into the same issue, I would recommend against using AssetSync. According to Heroku:
Many developers make use of Amazon’s S3 service for serving static assets that
have been uploaded previously, either manually or by some form of build process.
Whilst this works, this is not recommended as S3 was designed as a file storage
service and not for optimal delivery of files under load. Therefore, serving
static assets from S3 is not recommended.
Amazon CloudFront is the preferred method of serving assets through a CDN, and is very easy to configure with a Rails app that serves its own static assets, accomplishing the same goals as AssetSync.
I'm pretty new to this stuff, but to get the asset_path to work, don't you need a .erb on the end of that file?
Check out the bottom of this article for more info:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails-4-asset-pipeline
If it works in development, that may not help. There is a helpful section on debugging at the bottom of the article though.
Update
Here's another article that could help:
https://medium.com/self-directed-learning/9ba1f595102a
Flipping on this configuration in Heroku made some of my asset pipeline problems go away:
heroku labs:enable user-env-compile -a yourapp
Hope this helps!
Alex
Is there a gem or method available in Rails 3.1 that can upload assets to amazon cloud front automatically and use those instead of serving locally hosted ones? I guess it's easy to upload compiled assets manually and then change the rails app config to use that asset host, but when an asset is modified, the uploads to cloud front would need to be done manually again. Any good ways out there for this?
Definitely check out asset_sync on github. Or our Heroku dev centre article on Using a CDN asset Host with Rails 3.1 on Heroku.
There is quite a big performance improvement in using asset_sync vs a CDN custom origin, letting your application lazily compile assets in production or serving them precompiled directly off your app servers. However I would say that. I wrote it.
With asset_sync and S3 you can precompile assets meaning all the assets are there ready to be served on the asset host / CDN immediately
You can only require the :assets bundle in application.rb on precompile, saving memory in production
Your app servers are NEVER hit for asset requests. You can spend expensive compute time on, you know. Computing.
Best practice HTTP cache headers are all set by default
You can enable automatic gzip compression with one extra config
If you use Cloudfronts “Custom origin” option you do not need to upload anything, Cloudfront will fetch the assets from your server when needed. For details of setting this up see:
http://blog.ertesvag.no/post/10720082458
Take a look at https://github.com/rumblelabs/asset_sync - we're using it just to S3 but I guess the CloudFront part is pretty easy once the assets are on S3.
It's ends up being a rake task that you just add to execute in your deployment process.
another option would be https://github.com/moocode/asset_id, the readme has an example to use it with cloudfront.
It should work with rails 3.1 but I have only used it on 3.0.x.
Ss John said all solutions would end up being a rake task + a bit of logic to change the asset path in rails.
I am interested in the pros and cons of the different tools for managing assets in Rails 3.0.x (especially on Heroku).
There are already some older questions regarding this topic, but in the meanwhile there are some new tools available.
I am especially interested in these tools:
Jammit
AssetHat
Rack PageSpeed
Jammit seems to can do everything that AssetHat can do and is also longer available. So where does AssetHat fit in?
Rack PageSpeed seems to do everything on the fly by directly working on the server response. Did you experience any performance issues by doing that? Would you recommend it over the other two solutions?
Hey there, I'm the author of AssetHat. Minification and concatenation are among the easiest performance boosts to implement; these features are common to Jammit, AssetHat, and rack-pagespeed. Rails has supported concatenation for a long time now (though it's done at runtime, rather than during deployment), and it's no surprise that Rails 3.1 supports both minification and concatenation during deployment.
The remaining features are what make each of these asset managers interesting. For example, Jammit is useful if you want to embed images and font files directly into your stylesheets. rack-pagespeed is also handy if you want to keep all your optimizations in a completely separate layer.
Inlining assets into CSS is great for static pages where stylesheets change infrequently. However, if your site is under active development, and the stylesheet changes even a tiny bit, the user's browser has to re-download the whole thing—including inline images and fonts that probably didn't change. It depends on the nature of your project.
If your assets are too big to inline or concatenate, AssetHat helps optimize for CDNs and parallel loading:
It takes great advantage of CDNs, whether it's Google's CDN, cdnjs (which uses Amazon's servers), or another CDN of your choosing. For example, just add <%= include_js :jquery %> to your layout (and a version number in a config file) to load jQuery from Google's CDN. If you're in dev mode and have a local copy of jQuery, that loads instead—easy offline dev.
AssetHat can rewrite stylesheets' image URLs to use your CDN instead. This reads from your config.action_controller.asset_host setting, and is done at deploy time. Your original CSS is left untouched.
If you have several JS files to load, it's sometimes faster to load them in parallel than to concatenate them (i.e., force them to load serially). You can switch on LABjs mode easily: <%= include_js 'big-file-1', ..., 'big-file-n', :loader => :lab_js %>. If you don't have a copy of LABjs locally, or if you're in production, LABjs loads from Amazon's servers via cdnjs.
By using CDNs like Google's or Amazon's, your users can load more assets in parallel (because there are more hostnames), enjoy greater speed, and sometimes, not even need to download assets at all (e.g., if they already loaded Google's copy of jQuery via someone else's website).
I've used AssetHat on Heroku by setting my deploy script to simply run rake asset_hat:minify (to minify and concatenate CSS/JS), commit those changes to my repository, then do the actual deployment.
In case you haven't seen these already, you might be interested in:
a longer walkthrough of AssetHat's features
the official website
the technical readme
the extensive docs
If you need help setting it up, or have any other questions, feel free to message me on GitHub (rondevera) or Twitter (#ronalddevera).
Jammit won't work out of the box on Heroku as far as I know. One option seems to be to use the Heroku Jammit plugin to manage your assets - https://github.com/chebyte/heroku-jammit.
Alternatively, Jammit can be configured to output to /tmp: http://geekninja.blogspot.com/2011/04/making-jammit-jam-with-heroku.html
Rails 3.1 will include Sprockets to handle asset packaging, I think that's worth considering.
I am currently using jammit on heroku, together with amazon s3, and it works like a charm :)
I can't say much about the others tools because I have not used them.
Which one did you pick, in the end?
Fernando.
I'm currently wrestling with a lot of all.js / all.css missing hits on a rails 2 upgraded to 3 app on Heroku. I'd prefer not to have a dozen or so stylesheet links per request, and also don't want to statically bundle -> s3 the files as part of the deploy.
This seems like a familiar problem, preparing some content specific to a url and sending it back to the browser.
Rather than using an external bundling app as part of a deploy script etc, has anyone considered having rails generate these files on-the-fly and use varnish to cache them (since it's cleared on redeploy, which is when the css/js files would change)?
My question is whether this has been done already & I just failed to google it, or if it sounds like a dumb idea, why?
Even better: Rails 3.1 asset pipeline does exactly this, and Heroku handles precompilation and caching for you.