If I make a change to application.css.scss, no changes are reflected unless I do rake assets:precompile. However, when I run that, none of the JavaScript in my application works. At that point, I have no way of getting the JavaScript to work unless I re-clone the application from GitHub (which wipes out my CSS changes of course). This is all on a local development environment. Any ideas as to why?
Running in development environment should not use precompiled assets unless you've previously precompiled them.
Clean them up with rake assets:clobber and it should pick up your assets as opposed to the precompiled ones.
Related
I read the docs but can't seem to understand if you have to run rake assets:precompile locally each time you change scss file or any other assets? Isn't there an automatic way to do it? One of the things I have noticed is that I forget to run it sometimes and my heroku changes do not appear. There must be a way to set it up automatically in rails?
If I change
config.assets.compile = false
to true, will do that it? Is a disadvantage of doing that?
You don't have to precompile your assets for Heroku to serve them. Heroku will precompile your assets automatically if you have not already precompiled assets locally. Read this heroku doc regarding the asset pipeline in Rails 3 (even if you are already using Rails 4). Then read this doc regarding the asset pipeline in Rails 4 on heroku.
Pay particular attention to this part:
If a public/assets/manifest.yml is detected in your app, Heroku will
assume you are handling asset compilation yourself and will not
attempt to compile your assets. Rails 4 uses a file called
public/assets/manifest-.json instead. On both versions you
can generate this file by running $ rake assets:precompile locally and
checking the resultant files into Git.
rake assets:precompile must be run for production environment. Do not need to run the command for the development environment. The command is used to collect all files into one and so be lighter to serve in production. Under development the styles they are wanted in the assets folder. After running the command, the styles are placed in the public folder.
If you forget to run rake assets:precompile Heroku should do it automatically. One reason it may not be is if you have checked your public folder into git as then during slug compilation Heroku will assume you precompiled your assets and will not do it for you.
Setting config.assets.compile = true can slow down your application by a lot, which is why it is only used in development.
I precompiled assets on my dev environment (by mistake!) now any changes done on js/css files are not reflecting on browsing site locally.
I removed assets folder from public directory but then no css/js was available.
How do I get rid of this?
As a temporary solution I just cloned project into new directory and it works.
The question is: why do you need asset precompilation in the development environment? It's not meant to work like this.
The asset pipeline allows working in development with the uncompressed, unminified versions of your JS files. It also reloads them each time you refresh your browser, so you can develop your application with ease.
In production, though, the asset pipeline precompiles the JS files / assets you have into one single, minified file. This allows for better performance on the client as the files are smaller and are fetched in one single request.
So precompiling assets in development makes no sense at all.
In case if I understood you correctly, generally, when you precompile by default assets directory is being created inside public directory. To get your assets back, you can precompile again.
There is also a cache in tmp directory that you might consider removing.
Later you could use a $ (bundle exec) rake assets:precompile in combination with $ (bundle exec) rake assets:clean instead of $ rm -r public/assets so that new assets would be in effect rake way.
A one line command to look at new changes after your commits in environment would be
$ RAILS_ENV=(environment) rake assets:clean assets:precompile
but generally in development assets are not meant to be served as in production mode, so running previous with RAILS_ENV=production and starting a local server in production mode would be considered as a way to check (but not to make sure) if your assets would be served upon deployment in real production.
I went into the exact same problem and resolved it following #dashi's advice: 'remove directory assets in public, then start server in development mode.' everything is back to normal.
Today I was working with an application I've had running on Heroku for a few months now and in an attempt to get something working I ran in my development environment:
rake assets:precompile
When I committed my changes and pushed to Heroku, I get 500 errors on my request:
ActionView::Template::Error (jquery.flexslider-min.js isn't precompiled):
I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do, I've tried a few things:
Lazily compile in production (which I really don't want to do):
Bundler.require(:default, :assets, Rails.env)
Specifically list all of the files that need to be "precompiled" (also don't really want to do this, doesn't seem very efficient):
config.assets.precompile += ...
So far I've simply done a rollback to my last working version. I'm currently stuck unable to push new code. Will be setting up a staging environment (like I should've done long ago) but not sure what to do next or what might fix this issue? Why didn't this throw an error before?
UPDATE
rake assets:clean
Appears to have resolved the problem, although I don't understand why. Can someone share some insight into this?
If you running Rails 4.0 or above, rake assets:clean has been replaced with rake assets:clobber.
However, there are some current problems with clean and clobber with regards to permanently deleting assets. You can follow the issue here. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/issues/123
I'm willing to bet a compiled version/filename inside of manifest.yml in the public/assets folder was out of date/wrong.
If you've made changes to the flexslider.js file, you'll need to recompile with rake assets:precompile and push the updated version to github. I believe you can set the version of the assets inside of the manifest.yml file.
Also, I believe you can run heroku run rake assets:clean or heroku run rake assets:precompile.
I don't think it would be a good idea to precompile assets inside of heroku because of versioning and name conflicts/not stored in github.
You can clean the assets in heroku and push the repo again, so you wouldn't need to precompile locally and push to github, unless there was indeed an issue in the local compilation.
I'd also take a few minutes to read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html
Another possibility is your file name is having issues with sprockets. Why not use the development version of the flexslider.js, rename it to something slightly more convenient, and allow sprockets to do the minification.
Found the solution in the GitHub thread:
increment the config.assets.version variable in
${project-root}/config/application.rb
Assets were refreshed after I'd added config.assets.version = '1.1' at the end of my config file.
Every time I pull code into my repository after making changes to JS or CSS files, I run the following commands:
rake assets:clean
rake assets:precompile
I've got quite a bit of assets, so this process always takes at least a minute. Is there any way to get it to go faster? For example, if I've only changed CSS, is there a way to tell it to only focus on CSS files and not to bother cleaning and precompiling JS?
Edit: Oops, I should have specified that this is on production. I'm aware I don't need to precompile assets on development :)
I am assuming that you are running Rails >3.1.
Don't run the rake tasks at all. Rails development mode doesn't need the assets to be precompiled. Rails will automagically compile the assets when there is a change else it will not.
If you are looking for performance while serving assets in development you can look the gems such as https://github.com/wavii/rails-dev-tweaks
This an add-on not pretending to be an answer.
Process monitor in Windows shows that ruby.exe makes cycles while doing assets:precompile and in each cycle it queries all the gems installed again and again.
Rails 3.2.1
I am developing an application with Rails 3.0 and Backbone and I tried
asset precompilation (rake assets:precompile).
Since then any change I made in the code is not reflected in the executed application,
in development environment.
Thank in advance
You'll have to pre-compile assets every time you make a change.
rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=development
I proposed a possible cause and solution to a similar question here which relates to
config/application.rb containing files to be precompiled.
I am writing with respect to Rails 3.2.22
if you are facing this problem then here is solution:-
Causes
Since you are run rake assets:precompile the script has created a folder public/assets and generated all the assets file the browser might ask for. So, when you make new changes in the js/css asset files, the requests from browser are served from public/assets directory.
Two Solutions
rm -df public/assets
rake assets:clean