I have a problem with certain assets on heroku. (local environment is working fine)
The assets are in the pipeline. If I execute in the heroku rails console:
helper.asset_path("typicons.woff")
helper.asset_path("backgrounds/1.jpg")
I get the following response:
/assets/typicons-c2430aad2b6a33948dc064cfaee8ad65ff9e3ca439834f3aaa84abec3d10dea8.woff
/assets/backgrounds/1-c2098ff7e7fbb89b2d18e9cd9089f712f2b837265d1d2e4182c36c23392760c6.jpg
So I assume that the assets are in the heroku asset pipeline. As well by opening the url directly with the digest in it, I receive the file.
However if I try to reference the files in css or javascript like this:
$('.top-content').backstretch("/assets/backgrounds/1.jpg");
The file does not load. As well opening /assets/backgrounds/1.jpg directly does not work. Referencing assets from .rb or .erb files works.
Please can someone tell me, what kind of config I have to change, so the URLs for assets work as well without the digest?
Thank you!
Assuming you are using a fairly standard asset pipeline setup, this passage from the Rails Guides should help:
If you add an erb extension to a JavaScript asset, making it something such as application.js.erb, you can then use the asset_path helper in your JavaScript code:
-- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html (section 2.3.3)
In your example, add the erb extension to your JS file and then change the line to
$('.top-content').backstretch(<%= asset_path("backgrounds/1.jpg") %>);
The problem is that Rails 4 does not support non-digested assets at all.(For whatever reason)
Here is a more thorough explanation on the issue: Non Digested Asset Names in Rails 4
My personal workaround was to add a public asset folder to my app:
public/assets/static/
and upload the assets required there. Since it was only about fonts and background images, which do not change often, it does not seem to be a problem. In the link above there are several other solutions proposed.
Related
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
What I want is really simple - I want all assets except a particular css file (that references image assets and thus needs to go through the asset pipeline) to be precompiled. How do I exclude that css file from being precompiled?
There are a couple possible answers depending on what you want. I'm not quite sure what you're asking.
If it's in app/assets, you really need anything in there to go through the asset pipeline to be available. In production, you need to precompile all your assets in that are part of the asset pipeline -- and need to re-precompile in production mode whenever they change.
If the asset name doesn't have a scss or sass suffix, it won't go through the scss/sass compiler, although it'll still go through the asset pipeline for fingerprinting in filename, gzipping, etc.
If you really don't want an asset to go through the asset pipeline at all, then you can't really put it in app/assets. You have to put it in public instead. Then it gets confusing how to generate a URL to it, the best way is to use public_path + "/subdir/foo.css".
But I'm not sure that's what you're asking. If you have an asset file that references image paths, normally you do need that to through the asset pipeline, absolutely! Because it's the asset pipeline that will fill out the URLs properly for those image assets. You'll want to use the Rails asset_path helper in the asset file to generate the URL to an image. You can put an .erb on the end of the file, and then use ERB codes <%= asset_path('my_asset.css') %> in it it. Or if it's sass,asset_path` might be built into rails sass already, I forget.
I don't fully understand what problem you are having exactly, but I think what you are asking for may not actually be what you need. Have you checked out the Rails Asset Pipeline guide? It's pretty decent. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html
It sounds like you actually want a file precompiled separately from the other files?
If so you just need to add it to the Rails.application.config.assets.precompile array. Look in config/initializers/assets.rb for a commented line as an example.
I'm just getting into the Asset Pipeline; I'm using SASS/SCSS, but I'm not understanding why I should be using the Asset Helpers.
For example, if I have some CSS/SCSS without using an Asset Helper:
background-image: url('rails.png');
This will work fine because both my .SCSS file and image are in and accessible through the assets directory.
What's the point of doing this?:
background-image: asset-url("rails.png", image);
I understand it will add "/assets/" to the url, but why should I be using the Asset Helpers if the standard CSS way will work?
I think I'm missing something. Does it have something to do with deploying to production?
Using the helpers gives you access to the finger printed URLs in production. From the Asset Pipeline guide:
In the production environment Rails uses the fingerprinting scheme outlined above. By default it is assumed that assets have been precompiled and will be served as static assets by your web server.
During the precompilation phase an MD5 is generated from the contents of the compiled files, and inserted into the filenames as they are written to disc. These fingerprinted names are used by the Rails helpers in place of the manifest name.
So in production, the paths have an MD5 appended and you have things like this:
/assets/pancakes-af27b6a414e6da00003503148be9b409.png
With the checksums in place, Rails can tell browsers to cache these files forever. Then, if you do a new release that changes one of your assets, the checksum changes and that changes the whole path; the new path makes the browser think it is a whole new file so it will fetch it again. Without the checksums you can easily get old files stuck in browser caches and that sort of thing isn't exactly a happy fun time.
Everything works great in Development. And app deploys as normal with Capistrano. Assets (javascript & css) appear to be fully pre-compiled and each, along with images, are given a "fingerprint". Problem is when using image_tag("image-name.png") in my view the html it creates in production doesn't include the 'fingerprint'.
The rendered HTML we get in production:
<img alt="Image-name" src="/assets/image-name.png" />
instead of, what I would expect, should be:
<img alt="Image-name" src="/assets/image-name-b89cae2830c2901f844c353b3f3942fe.png" />
So which of Rails 3.1's myriad config options did we botch?
Edit
The troublesome images appear to be those included in a 3rd-party Colorbox image viewing tool we use. Rails 3.1 is fingerprinting its assets (border.png, etc.) but, clearly, the source code for this javascript library doesn't use helpers like image_tag. So in production it is still looking for images named /assets/colorbox/border.png. Currently images are in /vendor/assets/images and work fine in Development. Is there a way to prevent just these images from being "fingerprinted"?
Well, here's how I hacked the 3rd-party files to make things work:
The offending images were in files like vendor/assets/stylesheets/colorbox.css. I first changed the extension of the files to .scss then I changed each url(colorbox/image.png) to image_url("color box/image.png") and now everything is peachy. Assets are served normally in development and fingerprinted in production.
Still like to see the "proper" way to add 3rd-party (vendor) javascript libraries & css to a Rails 3.1 app. Rails team must have anticipate a drop-in solution that doesn't require editing?!? So, please, feel free to offer up other solutions.
Aside: where I previously had manually configured my Capistrano recipe with:
run "cd #{release_path}; RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile"
…and its accompanying after deploy:update_code …. I have now removed those lines and instead added load 'deploy/assets to my Capfile. I don't think this makes any difference in the above problem but I wanted to document it anyway as adding your own recipe for pipeline precompiling is no longer necessary in Capistrano 2.8 as it was in the 3.1rc days.
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?