I have a question relating to how precompiled assets are utilized in a production environment. What about general file attachments as a part of the model? For example, I have the model "Event". You can have n attachments to the model, and they can be any file you want. Typically they are either image files or PDF files, but they can also be Excel files for example. These files are to be displayed as links to the user and the user can click the link to open the file. The attachment files are stored in the /assets directory in the following manner, alongside the standard assets:
/assets
/images
/javascripts
/stylesheets
/attachments
/events
/11
poster.jpg
event-details.pdf
Now as I understand it, when I run the precompile method, Sprockets generates gzipped/MD5'ed versions of the files to be served...how do I deal with these attachment files? If I run the precompile method, everything gets gzipped...but when I add/remove attachments further down the road through the web interface, some will be gzipped and others won't. What's the best way to deal with this?
I gave up trying to figure out a way around it and just set all the attachments as well as paperclip attachments to be physically put in the /public directory. From my vantage point, this removes the benefit of compressed assets, but whatever.
Related
What's considered an "asset" in the Ruby on Rails universe?
Are user generated files, such as images uploaded by the user, considered assets? Where should they be stored in the standard file structure of a Rails project? Should they be kept clear of any asset related directories like:
app/assets
lib/assets
public/assets
Relevant: The Asset Pipeline
Generally asset is anything that browser loads after it gets the HTML page. Meaning javascript, css and any images. But as you pointed out there are two different image types in a rails project.
1) the images related to your css and layout design, those go under the app/assets/images
2) the images that your users upload, those normally go into the public/system or public/uploads folder depending on what you use to receive the uploads
The lib/assets (or sometimes vendor/assets) is where you supposed to place js/css/images related to your front-end design and provided by third party libs. Say if you want to pull in some css or a js framework, that were you should place it.
And finally public/assets is where rails will compile your layout assets from the app/assets and vendor/assets folders when you run rake assets:precompile task for production.
To have it short, your design stuff goes to app/assets, and the user uploads go into public/system
User-uploaded files are not part of assets, and should definitely be kept clear of asset-related folders. You should put them somewhere in your public directory. I put mine in public/uploads, which is a common convention. And then you should ignore those files in git (or whatever VCS you're using).
Assets are basically: javascript, stylesheets, fonts, and images which are part of the site design itself, not part of the user-uploaded content.
I am new to rails so this is probably a simple question about using the asset pipeline.
In my app, I want to use this jquery plugin: http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/star-rating/
So to do it, I included the following gem in my gemfile: https://github.com/RichGuk/jquery-star-rating-rails
However, I find that the image used for the star ratings is too low resolution and I'd also like to change the style. However, all 3 versions of the stars that are displayed are held in one image so I'd have to play around with the scripts as well to make sure they are configured properly if I make the image for the stars larger.
Back to my question: How do I edit this image file in my application?
I've tried downloading all the files and putting them in my vender directory and editing the file but it did not seem to work.
I know the files are included by the gem but how do make the files visible to edit?
Appreciate the help!
So the asset pipeline consists of potentially many directories (assuming you are using gems that inject their own assets into the pipeline). When an asset is being grabbed in Rails, Rails goes through these directories (in the same order, every time) to find the asset. When the name of the file is first found, that's it, Rails grabs it and uses that file.
Vendor asset directories are specified after app assets, I believe. So, if you place the image that you want to change in the app/assets/images folder, you'll essentially be overriding that vendor image in your application with your own image since Rails will search it's own app/assets first. Obviously, the files need to be named the same.
Try adding your star image in your assets path. It seem to
reference star.gif using the asset_path
I would also try
overriding the star plugin by creating your own css file.
I want to do something what I thought will be a simple task:
Have a form with these controls:
File upload for one file
Checkbox if this file should be extracted
Text input where I would specify which file should I link to (required only if the checkbox is checked) - index_file
After submitting form:
If the checkbox isn't checked, upload the file via CarrierWave to S3 to the specified store_dir
If the checkbox is checked, extract all files from the archive (I expect only ZIP archives; I need to keep the directory structure), upload extracted files to the specified store_dir and set the index_file in database (I don't need to save to database anything about other extracted files)
As I have found, it isn't an easy task because of Heroku limitations. These files will have a large size (hundreds of MiBs or a few GiBs), so I don't want to redownload this file from S3 if possible.
I think that using Delayed Job or Resque might work, but I'm not exactly sure how to do it and what is the best solution of my problem.
Does anyone have any idea how to solve it with using the lowest resources as possible? I can change CarrierWave to another uploader (Paperclip etc.) and my hosting provider too if it isn't possible on Heroku.
I was also thinking about using CloudFlare, would this still work without problems?
Thank you for answers.
Based on this heroku support email, it would seem that the /tmp directory is many gigs in size. You just need to clean up after yourself so Heroku as a platform is not the issue.
A couple of articles may help you solve the problem:
https://github.com/jnicklas/carrierwave/wiki/How-to%3A-Make-Carrierwave-work-on-Heroku - which explains how to configure your app to use the /tmp directory as the cache directory for CarrierWave. Pay attention to the following line:
use Rack::Static, :urls => ['/carrierwave'], :root => 'tmp' # adding this line
This instructs rack to serve /carrierwave/xzy from the /tmp directory (useful for storing images temporarily)
Then, using the uploader.cache! method, you can deliberately cache the inbound uploaded file. Once stored, you can do checks to determine whether to call the uploader.store! method which will promote the contents to S3 (assuming you configured S3 as the store for CarrierWave.
I still don't quite get it, where to put images in rails 3.1, in these situation:
Images are processed (f.e. by paperclip or by dragonfly ) and stored in folder (not with external service like s3, ..f.e. in develompent)
when I have just images, that I'll use in stylesheet (f.e. backrounds)
Icons (AppStore, Facebook ...)
thanx
Stylesheet images should be placed in app/assets, while files uploaded by paperclip in public/system. In case of assets , fingerprints will be created for every file, so they can be properly cached. If cached file changes, fingerprint changes too and in such way cache is invalidated.
UPDATE:
To reference files in app/assets (e.g. specifying image url in css) you`ll need to use special asset pipeline ERB or SCSS helpers (like image-path and image-url for SCSS and asset_path for ERB).
With the introduction of the new directory structure in 3.1 (i.e. app/assets/), should app images (logo, banner, icons, main bg, etc) still be stored in public/images or should they go into app/assets/images?
Someone mentioned:
I would be shocked if anything in
app/assets can be served publicly -
that wouldn't make sense from either a
security viewpoint or from honoring
the convention of the public
directory. Since you need these flash
files to be publicly accessible, you
should store them in public.
Valid point. Which brings me to the question:
Based on above understanding. What about the app images? If images such as logo, banner, main background, icons are considered public, why is there an images directory in app/assets?
Or should we still put these types of images in public/images. If so, what is the images dir in app/assets used for?
Note: I haven't looked at Rails 3.1 yet...
As far as I understood DHH's keynote, app/assets was introduced so you could structure your application in a better way. But there's nothing wrong with storing images in public/images. Thanks to Michiel for pointing out that public/images will no longer be with us in Rails 3.1!
The public folder will the replaced by the assets folder. That's the folder that your web server will point to. Files from app/assets, lib/assets or other places will be copied (images) or compiled (css, js) to assets.
That means that assets is now considered a build directory, and you shouldn't store anything there - you might even decline to put it under version control, and just have the server generate or copy the images and css and scripts when you deploy.
See also: http://blog.nodeta.com/2011/06/14/rails-3-1-asset-pipeline-in-the-real-world/