Recently, on my latest deploy to Heroku, I got a warning advising not to use AssetSync.
remote: ###### WARNING:
remote: You are using the `asset_sync` gem.
remote: See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/please-do-not-use-asset-sync for more information.
The original problem we were trying to solve by using AssetSync was that we were getting a huge slug size caused by the large assets in our application. Out of the 300MB that Heroku allows us, we were probably using close to 230MB - even though our git repo is only around 80MB.
We solved this by using AssetSync to synchronise all our compiled assets to a S3 bucket to be served through Cloudfront. After AssetSync runs, we have a hook that deletes all the precompiled assets to reduce the slug size. Basically, the workflow during slug compilation looked like this:
Let Heroku precompile the assets
AssetSync syncs all compiled assets to S3
All local copies of the compiled assets are deleted
The linked article argues a few points on why it's bad and what to use instead.
Using Asset Sync can cause failures. It is difficult to debug,
unnecessary, and adds extra complexity. Don’t use it. Instead, use a
CDN.
[...]
You should now use a CDN instead. Rather than
copying your assets over to S3 after they are precompiled, the CDN
grabs them from your website. Here are some reasons why that’s better.
Canonical assets
[...] It allows you to have single, authoritative places where you
store information. If you need to change that information, you only
need to change it in one place. [...] What happens if someone has a
failed deploy after assets get synced? What if someone modifies a file
in the S3 bucket? Instead of fixing one copy of assets, now you must
fix two.
Deploy determinism
If you’re debugging inside of a dyno with heroku run bash and you run
rake assets:precompile this doesn’t just modify your local copy. It
actually modifies the copy on S3 as well. [...] The sync part of
asset_sync can also fail if there’s a glitch in the network. What if
you only write part of a file, or only half of your assets are synced?
These things happen.
Although I agree with their points, the question remains: what's the recommended way to deploy a Heroku application that becomes huge when precompiled assets are stored in the slug?
The question is which assets files are making the slug huge?
By default, the Rails assets pipeline should only be used for small and limited internal assets (like JS, CSS, some logos, etc.).
It's not a great idea to store a huge amount of external or big files as Rails assets for many reasons aside the pipeline (like it's making your Git directory big in size too).
Related
The situation
I couldn't get my vendor assets to precompile in heroku without specifying each individual file to precompile in config/initializers/assets so resorted to setting
config.assets.compile = true
Note: I didn't require vendor assets in application.js because I'm calling them on a per page basis when they are needed.
Anyhow I setup a Cloudfront account and now everything is working as it does in development. But on deploy to Heroku, there is a warning and a link that leads to a StackOverflow post, warning against setting config.assets.compile to true.
Compile Set to True in Production If you have enabled your application
to config.assets.compile = true in production, your application might
be very slow. This was best described in a stack overflow post:
When you have compile on, this is what happens: Every request for a
file in /assets is passed to Sprockets. On the first request for each
and every asset it is compiled and cached in whatever Rails is using
for cache (usually the filesystem). On subsequent requests Sprockets
receives the request and has to look up the fingerprinted filename,
check that the file (image) or files(css and js) that make up the
asset were not modified, and then if there is a cached version serve
that.
This setting is also known to cause other run-time instabilities and
is generally not recommended. Instead we recommend either precompiling
all of your assets on deploy (which is the default) or if that is not
possible compiling assets locally.
My question is, Since I'm now using Cloudfront, does that cover me from what they are warning about, slowness etc.?
Thanks in advance for any advice :)
Yes, you're likely covered. The request for an asset will hit CloudFront first. After the first request, it will be cached and shouldn't hit your server for compilation. Every time your assets change, however, they'll have to recompile, which is of course very slow.
I have deployed my exhisting project to Heroku. My main pages display some images, which have not loaded on heroku ..... And my backend end authentication pages , accessible only by me, will not accept my user/pass.
images are stored in
app/assets/images
Several points for you
Images
Heroku runs an ephemeral file system, which essentially means your files are overwritten each time you push a new deploy.
This doesn't matter for asset based images, but if you're using the likes of Paperclip to store dynamically-uploaded images, you need to ensure you're able to persist the data (with the likes of S3)
--
Precompilation
In your case, the problem will likely be to do with the precompilation process:
In the production environment Sprockets uses the fingerprinting scheme
outlined above. By default Rails assumes assets have been precompiled
and will be served as static assets by your web server.
Precompilation of the assets is when the Rails application will serve assets from the /public directory, rather than the /assets dir. This is super important as it means if you're referencing assets using "static" CSS references, it simply won't work, especially on Heroku
The best solution for this is to use one of the Rails preprocessors (SCSS / SASS) & use one of the asset path helpers to reference the dynamic asset location:
#app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss
body {
background: asset_url("your_image.png");
}
--
Authentication
Your authentication is probably a problem with your database
A problem with Heroku is that as it uses a different database than your local system, you'll have to populate it with the data required to get it working.
It's a common issue to not be able to load the database correctly, missing out many different migrations. I would recommend the following:
$ heroku run rake db:migrate
After this, you need to ensure that you're able to create the relevant details in your application
I have compiled assets using following command in rails 3.2 for production purpose.
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile
After running above command an assets a folder is created under public. Now I want to removed non-compile assets folder because it is huge. But I have need answers to following questions.
Do I need the assets folder that contains non-compiled assets ?
If yes then what is purpose of having a non-compiled assets folder ?
I will appreciate your help.
Yes, keep them.
The purpose is that when they are taken from assets to public they are usually minified and combined, greatly saving space and helping to reduce download time for end users when using the site. But when you need to make changes, use the originals in assets.
In development mode (local, on your box), the assets version is used and is useful in traces while developing/debugging as they point to the actual source code lines in question and have the original (usually longer and meaningful) variable names.
Most likely you will need to make changes to one of your assets in app/assets in the future.
app/assets has the original source files with original formatting and these are the files you should change.
Theoretically you could delete the source files in app/assets, but then you won't be able to change anything and re-compile with those changes.
The default Rails app installed by rails new has config.assets.compile = false in production.
And the ordinary way to do things is to run rake assets:precompile before deploying your app, to make sure all asset pipeline assets are compiled.
So what happens if I set config.assets.compile = true in production?
I wont' need to run precompile anymore. What I believe will happen is the first time an asset is requested, it will be compiled. This will be a performance hit that first time (and it means you generally need a js runtime in production to do it). But other than these downsides, after the asset was lazily compiled, I think all subsequent access to that asset will have no performance hit, the app's performance will be exactly the same as with precompiled assets after this initial first-hit lazy compilation. is this true?
Is there anything I'm missing? Any other reasons not to set config.assets.compile = true in production? If I've got a JS runtime in production, and am willing to take the tradeoff of degraded performance for the first access of an asset, in return for not having to run precompile, does this make sense?
I wrote that bit of the guide.
You definitely do not want to live compile in production.
When you have compile on, this is what happens:
Every request for a file in /assets is passed to Sprockets. On the first request for each and every asset it is compiled and cached in whatever Rails is using for cache (usually the filesystem).
On subsequent requests Sprockets receives the request and has to look up the fingerprinted filename, check that the file (image) or files(css and js) that make up the asset were not modified, and then if there is a cached version serve that.
That is everything in the assets folder and in any vendor/assets folders used by plugins.
That is a lot of overhead as, to be honest, the code is not optimized for speed.
This will have an impact on how fast asset go over the wire to the client, and will negatively impact the page load times of your site.
Compare with the default:
When assets are precompiled and compile is off, assets are compiled and fingerprinted to the public/assets. Sprockets returns a mapping table of the plain to fingerprinted filenames to Rails, and Rails writes this to the filesystem. The manifest file (YML in Rails 3 or JSON with a randomised name in Rails 4) is loaded into Memory by Rails at startup and cached for use by the asset helper methods.
This makes the generation of pages with the correct fingerprinted assets very fast, and the serving of the files themselves are web-server-from-the-filesystem fast. Both dramatically faster than live compiling.
To get the maximum advantage of the pipeline and fingerprinting, you need to set far-future headers on your web server, and enable gzip compression for js and css files. Sprockets writes gzipped versions of assets which you can set your server to use, removing the need for it to do so for each request.
This get assets out to the client as fast as possible, and in the smallest size possible, speeding up client-side display of the pages, and reducing (with far-future header) requests.
So if you are live compiling it is:
Very slow
Lacks compression
Will impact render time of pages
Versus
As fast as possible
Compressed
Remove compression overheard from server (optionally).
Minimize render time of pages.
Edit: (Answer to follow up comment)
The pipeline could be changed to precompile on the first request but there are some major roadblocks to doing so. The first is that there has to be a lookup table for fingerprinted names or the helper methods are too slow. Under a compile-on-demand senario there would need to be some way to append to the lookup table as each new asset is compiled or requested.
Also, someone would have to pay the price of slow asset delivery for an unknown period of time until all the assets are compiled and in place.
The default, where the price of compiling everything is paid off-line at one time, does not impact public visitors and ensures that everything works before things go live.
The deal-breaker is that it adds a lot of complexity to production systems.
[Edit, June 2015] If you are reading this because you are looking for a solution for slow compile times during a deploy, then you could consider precompiling the assets locally. Information on this is in the asset pipeline guide. This allows you to precompile locally only when there is a change, commit that, and then have a fast deploy with no precompile stage.
To have less overhead with Pre-compiling thing.
Precompile everything initially with these settings in production.rb
# Precompile *all* assets, except those that start with underscore
config.assets.precompile << /(^[^_\/]|\/[^_])[^\/]*$/
you can then simply use images and stylesheets as as "/assets/stylesheet.css" in *.html.erb
or "/assets/web.png"
For anyone using Heroku:
If you deploy to Herkou, it will do the precompile for you automatically during the deploy if compiled assets are not included (i.e. public/assets not committed) so no need for config.assets.compile = true, or to commit the precompiled assets.
Heroku's docs are here. A CDN is recommended to remove the load on the dyno resource.
It won't be the same as precompiling, even after that first hit: because the files aren't written to the filesystem they can't be served directly by the web server. Some ruby code will always be involved, even if it just reads a cache entry.
Set config.asset.compile = false
Add to your Gemfile
group :assets do
gem 'turbo-sprockets-rails3'
end
Install the bundle
Run rake assets:precompile
Then Start your server
From the official guide:
On the first request the assets are compiled and cached as outlined in development above, and the manifest names used in the helpers are altered to include the MD5 hash.
Sprockets also sets the Cache-Control HTTP header to max-age=31536000. This signals all caches between your server and the client browser that this content (the file served) can be cached for 1 year. The effect of this is to reduce the number of requests for this asset from your server; the asset has a good chance of being in the local browser cache or some intermediate cache.
This mode uses more memory, performs poorer than the default and is not recommended.
Also, precompile step is not trouble at all if you use Capistrano for your deploys. It takes care of it for you. You just run
cap deploy
or (depending on your setup)
cap production deploy
and you're all set. If you still don't use it, I highly recommend checking it out.
Because it is opening a directory traversal vulnerability - https://blog.heroku.com/rails-asset-pipeline-vulnerability
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.