Public folder size is huge - digested assets - Ruby on Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

In my RoR app the production.rb has
MyApp::Application.configure do
config.cache_classes = true
config.eager_load = true
config.consider_all_requests_local = false
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
config.action_dispatch.show_detailed_exceptions = false
# Disable Rails's static asset server (Apache or nginx will already do this).
config.serve_static_assets = true
# Compress JavaScripts and CSS.
config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier
# Callback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed.
config.assets.compile = true
# Generate digests for assets URLs.
config.assets.digest = true
# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets.
config.assets.version = '1.3'
config.assets.prefix = "/assets-#{`git rev-parse HEAD`[0..8]}"
config.log_level = :debug
config.i18n.fallbacks = true
config.active_support.deprecation = :notify
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
end
The problem is in the server, the public folder size is 15GB. It contains a lot of folders with names like this:
assets-2d947fb8a
assets-64bb1c0ee
assets-6b4777157
assets-33d9c439d
assets-e6f2c6c37
assets-cb3a9bc23
assets-f1e77e02d
Each folder contains digested images, js, css, and more.
So, is there a way to delete/expire these assets automatically?

Answer 1

Although very non-standard, I have to say, I kind of like this approach, seems cleaner to me than one huge assets dir that Rails uses now.
Anyway, if you want to keep say 10 newest assets directories and delete everything else, you can simply create a capistrano task (if you're using capistrano) and call a shell command for the dirs expiration from it, such as this one:
ls -td -- /path/to/rails/public/assets-*/ | # list dirs, order by newest
sed 's/.$//' | # remove the trailing '/'
tail -n +10 | # leave out first 10 directories
xargs rm -ri # delete the dirs!
With the -i option, deletion will be interactive, i.e. you will be asked to confirm every file to be deleted. Change this to -f when you are sure you have the script production-ready and the dirs will be deleted silently. SO answers here helped me construct the ls part.
You can put this small "script" into a capistrano task to be called after assets precompilation during deploy.