I am developing a rails application starting from webarch template. I know that adding the whole assets folder in the public/ folder will link the assets with my views, but it would not be taking advantage of the assets pipeline functions. The template has a lot of plugins and different options and one generally does not use all of it. The assets folder's size is 30MB.
I though about putting it inside vendor/assets and using it with the asset pipeline but this generates two problems:
I would be serving 30MB of minified code and using a small percentage of it in my app.
I would have to manually rewrite the whole assets folder to use links the way asset pipeline wants it (javascript_include_tag "file" to serve file.js). Of course, I would do this via a script but it still seems like a problem someone should have encountered first.
Since neither vendor/assets and public/ folders seem to be a proper location for these files I would like a better option (or a way to make the later options work better).
A solution to keep your files under asset pipeline when they are too big to reasonably be left in one single minimified asset file is to split your assets by categories, compile those categories in different minimified files, and include them in your views when needed.
I do it for an app that contains several "heavy" javascripts components that are located in different area of my app and are not often used.
1- Organize your file structure
In app/assets/javascrips and app/assets/stylesheets create one directory per category we are going to create. Examples:
app/assets/javascrips/common
app/assets/javascrips/admin
app/assets/javascrips/user_account
2- Create your manifests
In app/assets/javascrips and app/assets/stylesheets create one manifest file per category and have them included the related directory
File app/assets/javascrips/common.js
//= require jquery
//= require_tree ./common
File app/assets/javascrips/admin.js
//= require_tree ./admin
File app/assets/javascrips/user_account.js
//= require_tree ./user_account
3- Add your manifests to rails precompile list
You can do it in config/application.rb file, but when it gets big it is preferable to create an initializer file config/initializers/assets.rb
Rails.application.configure do
config.assets.precompile += %w[common.js admin.js user_account.js]
end
4- Include them in your views and layouts, and set-up your javascript libraries.
Import the assets files into layouts and views. It can be a good idea to create several layouts for different area of your application that would be using common assets files. The methods to use are
stylesheet_link_tag 'manifest_file' and javascript_include_tag 'manifest_file'
And keep in mind you may have to tell your javascript plug-ins they need to use the miniminied file when dynamically loading files. For them you can use a configuration .js.erb file. Example:
File app/assets/javascrips/admin/plug-in_config.js.erb
PLUGIN.config('dynamicFileName', '<%= javascript_path('manifest_file') %>');
I was wondering if there was a good solution for getting vendor html templates into the rails asset pipeline. Right now I'm making it work by putting the two templates I need in /public
I used Bower to install angular-ui-bootstrap and I can require the javascript fine from application.js after adding the config.assets.path in application.rb.
How do you do the same for the html templates that the angular module needs? The JS is in /src, the template is in /template.
Not sure I understand the question. You can add them as template strings js in assets/javascripts but it could get a little messy.
I'm guessing this is a silly question, but i'm a bit of a newb...
I've added the chosen gem to my rails app by adding it to my Gemfile and requiring chosen-jquery in my application.js file.
My question is: where can i find the actual javascript file for chosen? Is it downloading it automatically?
Simply include the JS and CSS files like described in the documentation on the main page of the Github project and it will be included when precompiling your assets. The files are not within your project directory but rather within the gem and will be resolved by the pipeline when the gem is included.
If you need to get to the file directly (for modifications), you need to put the JS in there manually. You can then still include it in the main application.js for the pipeline and have better control of the version in use. To me, this is the preferred method.
However, may I suggest switching to Select2 which is originally based on Chosen but under much more active development and better documentation:
http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/
https://github.com/ivaynberg/select2
There's also a gem for it if you like:
https://github.com/argerim/select2-rails
It's in a gem itself. If you look at vendor/assets/javascripts in gem root, you'll see all javascripts that come with chosen gem. They are added by assets pipeline, with
//= require chosen-jquery
line in your application.js.
Look up your assets load path. Like this:
in terminal cd to your app root
then open rails console
then run Rails.application.config.assets.paths
Your chosen-jquery is in one of those folders.
How can I use the custom templates of angular ui bootstrap in rails?
I mean, if I use pagination for example it will look for a templates/pagination/pagination.html template.
The problem is that rails won't serve templates in that path, it actually needs to be assets/templates/pagination/pagination.html using the <%= asset_path(....) %> helper.
Hacking the angular ui bootstrap javascript file is a way, but I don't feel like hacking it every time I get a new version.
What I would suggest is to bundle custom templates with the library itself or inside a separate file. The technique to use is to fill in $templateCache with the content of your custom templates. Have a look at one of the files distributed with tamplates to see what I mean:
https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap/blob/gh-pages/ui-bootstrap-tpls-0.3.0.js#L2042
You can bundle templates into the $templateCache as part of the build process or prepare this file manually (in this case you need to write templates as JS strings).
Downloading individual templates via XHR for each and every directive would be wasteful as it would result in many XHR requests and would slow down your application. Also, if you preload templates into the $templateCache you can specify required path, one that doesn't need to be a valid path on your WWW server.
I use bower to manage my js libs.
Hence I have these files in my vendor/assets/javascripts/ folder:
angular-ui/bootstrap-bower
With these files, you can simply require them in your javascript manifest file (usually application.js)
//= require angular-bootstrap/ui-bootstrap
//= require angular-bootstrap/ui-bootstrap-tpls
and then you don't need to specify any templates if you want to use the default built-in templates.
I find this solution in the following url
Ref:angular-ui-bootstrap-directive-template-missing
I'm new to the Asset Pipeline, having just migrated over from Rails 3.0. I'm trying to get CKEditor into the pipeline, but all the gems for it are really unclear about how they work, and have little or no usage instructions.
I would prefer to do this without using a gem, since it seems that all I have to do is drop the source files into the vendor/assets directory and then include them in application.js. I've tried that, however, when I precompile and push to production, it seems that some of the files aren't being found (editor.css, for example), and the editor doesn't show up at all (just blank area).
application.js
//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require ckeditor/ckeditor
//= require_self
That's with the source files in vendor/assets/javascript/ckeditor/, and is pointing to ckeditor.js. I'm just not sure where to go from here. This code works fine in development but does not work in production. I am running rake assets:precompile before adding and committing to git, and then pushing to heroku.
I got this working (deployed on Heroku), by:
Including the ckeditor code in vendor/assets/javascripts/ckeditor
Adding config.assets.precompile += ['ckeditor/*'] to my production.rb
Setup your ckeditor base path in the application.html.erb var CKEDITOR_BASEPATH = '/assets/ckeditor/'; before the include of the application.js
In application.js, include //= require ckeditor/ckeditor
Bite the bullet and use a gem. Two options here:
CKEditor Engine
https://github.com/galetahub/ckeditor.
This runs as an engine and includes its own mountable CKEditor in assets. It also exposes Ckeditor.assets which you can add to your assets path. This references all the images, plugins, language files and miscellaneous little bits of junk that CKEditor requires.
It has a shot at handling image uploads and it also integrates nicely with ActiveAdmin.
CKEditor Rails
https://github.com/tsechingho/ckeditor-rails
This does less, you include it in your asset pipeline and it does the rest for you. Nice and simple and sufficient for all basic use cases.
Upshot
I have used both of these on live projects and both do the job. Use the former if you plan on using ActiveAdmin and you want a smooth ride. Use the latter if you prefer minimal.
CKEditor is pretty ugly. Keep it at arms length, then when you need to upgrade you can swap it out for another.
If you are on Rails 3.1.0, you should upgrade to 3.1.1. In this version the precompile rake task compiles assets into both original and digested filenames. This is so third-party code that is not pipeline aware will still work.
You will need to add the ckeditor directory and all its child directories to the precompile array so that the precompile task knows to compile them.
config.assets.precompile += your_files
your_files can be an array of files, regexs or Procs - whatever is need to capture the names of the ckeditor files. I don't have ckeditor handy to work out what needs to go in precompile, so others might appreciate it if you post what you come up with!
One thing to watch is that if you have far-future headers set for the /assets directory on your webserver, you'll need to exclude the CKeditor directory. Because those files won't be fingerprinted, there may be issues when you update CKeditor with some clients not getting the updated code because they have a cached copy that marked to only expire some time in the future.
Have similar issue. For me it was fixed by overriding default precompile task (I used Rails 4 and CkEditor 4).
Add to application.rb config.assets.precompile += ['ckeditor/*']
In application.js //= require ckeditor/init
Create file lib/tasks/precompile_hook and paste text from this answer Precompile hook
Had the same issue, I've adjusted fallback in production for the assets which had not digest until it will be fixed:
config/environments/production.rb
config.assets.compile = true
what about ckeditor_assets directory in /public ? uploaded photos and attachments go to those directories, as defined by default in app/models/ckeditor/[attachment.rb,photo.rb]
ckeditor_assets is outside of assets and images/files are not accessible (url like http://yourdomain.com/ckeditor_assets/pictures/1/file.jpg will not work, but the file is there)
I spent some time getting the ckeditor_rails gem to work; maybe I can save some time for others trying to do the same.
The gem worked just fine out-of-the-box in development, but when deployed to production using precompiled assets under Phusion Passenger it did not. It was clear to me that the problem was that it was looking for assets under:
http://myhost.com/assets/ckeditor
where in fact it needed to be looking under:
http://myhost.com/my_app_name/assets/ckeditor
It was also clear to me that I needed somehow to set:
var CKEDITOR_BASEPATH = '/my_app_name/assets/ckeditor'
but no matter where or how I tried to do this, it wouldn't take.
Finally, I found on this key sentence on the gem wiki:
You can create app/assets/javascripts/ckeditor/basepath.js.erb to
have your own CKEDITOR_BASEPATH.
I created the file as specified (alongside my config.js file for configuring the editor), added my CKEDITOR_BASEPATH setting to the file, re-compiled my assets, and all was good.
In your config/development.rb make sure to set
config.assets.precompile += ['ckeditor/*']
as well as set
config.assets.debug = true