Less compiler doesn't update css file after LESS code is updated - ruby-on-rails

This is way beyond my knowledge..
I was migrating my rails 3 application from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 3. I downloaded Bootstrap 3 and FontAwesome, put them into my assets folder. Then I tried to modify the font path. I change #FontAwesomePath in font-awesome/variables.less several times, however it still don't points to the correct path. (I put font files in ./app/assets/fonts/font-awesome/)
#FontAwesomePath: "fonts/font-awesome"
It's ok, cuz I saw the line below this one is a cdn path to font files:
//#FontAwesomePath: "//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/3.2.1/font"; // for referencing Bootstrap CDN font files directly
I uncomment this line, everything seems fine. The compiled css file load the font from cdn and all icons are displaying.
Then I delete this line, try to point #FontAwesomePath back to local server again. STRANGE thing happened! No matter what I did, the compiled css file points it to the CDN path! I tried to clear browser cache, reboot rails server (I was using development mode of rails server), even to load the website from other computers, nothing changes. It insisting point #FontAwesomePath to the CDN path even no where in the whole application code exists the url! I can only image there is some kind of variable cache in less compiler. Can anybody tell me what's happened inside this? It's driven me crazy.
edit: I'm using less gem (v 2.3.2), which includes lesscss v 1.3.3.

I had issues with CSS updates, these where only solved by going to tmp > cache and deleting the assets folder then restarting the server. The CSS was then updated.
Hope this helps.
Steph

Related

Specific Image Not Loading After Rails 7 ESBuilt Update

I have a very frustrating issue with a Rails 7 app after migrating to Ruby 3.2 with Esbuild.
Basically there is a few specific images that simply will not load, however, there are many others that load just fine that live in the same location, and are accessed the exact same way. It's driving me nuts.
I have cleared cached, restarted servers, cleared all the local build files, everything I can think of. This is also happening in both dev and production.
My Esbuild is running just fine, it is finding the files and compiling them with a finger print. The files all exist and are in the right location. (all sitting under app/assets/builds)
Accessing the file direcly in the browser, ie
http://localhost:4000/assets/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png
Fails with a 404, cannot find the image. This file however exists with the correct name in the app/assets/builds folder.
Accessing another image from the page ie
http://localhost:4000/assets/leadstory-symbol-B5T7OIJB.png
Loads just fine.
It's almost like there is a static list of rails routes that match the images and it is not generating the route for some of these specific images, hence the 404, even though the file exists.
Some screenshots that highlight the odd behaviour
and the files listed in the directory, showing the file clearly exists
My package.json build step is
esbuild app/javascript/bundles/*.* --bundle --sourcemap --outdir=app/assets/builds --public-path=/assets --minify --log-limit=0 --loader:.js=jsx --loader:.png=file --loader:.svg=file
And a snip from the app of how its being loaded.
import LogoWhiteTrans from "../../assets/images/logo_white_trans.png";
<img src={LogoWhiteTrans} className="logo" alt="logo" />
Which looks to be working fine, the HTML outputs
<img src="/assets/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png" class="logo" alt="logo">
The image can be loaded fine, from elsewhere in the app in a regular rails view using asset helpers (not from within the React app)
ie <%= asset_path('logo_white_trans.png') %>
Something I have noticed is in the logs, I see
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/logo_white_trans-QEBURZJB.png"):
Notice there it does not say "/assets/logo_white_trans..."? I thought that was weird, as the URL in the image tag clearly has a /assets at the start. Trying either path does not work, with or without /assets directly in the browser. Just seems odd rails would see it that way
Im going nuts here, what am I missing. Its not a png specific issue, as other pngs are loading fine in the same way, nor is it an image issue the file exists and the naming is fine.
Is there some sort of manifest thats not being updated? An internal asset route list or something along those lines?
Im running Rails 7
Ruby 3.2
ESBuild
This isn't really an answer, but what I have ended up doing is moving all image assets out of the asset pipeline and into the public folder. I noticed that my assets were being duplicated by esbuilt and the rails asset precompile process, and basically the javascript build and rails eco system just do not work well together.
For anyone else having issues like this, we've just moved all our static assets in the public/images folder and we refernce the path /images/blah.png the same way in both React and Ruby now.
All image tags in either React or standard .erb views are just <img src="/images/blah.png/>. Its a lot cleaner.
Yes, we have given up asset finger printing, but its a small loss, considering most images never change and It's dramatically simplified things and sped up our build process considerably as it does not have to touch each file during precompilation.
Our views now also just have standard tags, instead of <asset_path> tags, which im sure is just quicker in general instead of ruby generating these asset strings all the time.
So, not really and answer to the initial question but it is a solution, and one i think anyone who is fusing modern javascript, react, typescript etc into a Rails app.

Extremely slow Rails webpacker compile times with hundreds of thousands of assets

I'm working on a project that includes pictures for a google maps overlay and consequently contains around 750k image assets. This project uses rails 6 and webpacker, and after copying in all the files to the correct directory the webpage load times increase to the point of hours. The assets are located in /app/assets/images/.
So far I've tried using rails assets:precompile, which after a night of compiling didn't finish.
An odd thing is this only happens after a server restart. If I copy in the files while the server is running then everything behaves and performs fine.
What can I do to fix this? Am I fundamentally misunderstanding where the images should go and how webpacker should fit in?
Thanks
Ultimately wound up not including the files in development. In production we use apache, and that serves the large number of files without any problem.

Rails with Twitter Bootstrap: still serving an old asset

Going nuts here. I'm developing a rails app, and I'm using the twitter-bootstrap-rails gem in order to include the Twitter Bootstrap styles in my app. This gem generates a file called 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' in app/assets/stylesheets, which I have been using to modify some of the bootstrap variables and include my own CSS overrides.
Everything has been working fine until today. For some reason, the changes I am making to this file today are getting saved to the file, but Rails is still serving the old version of the file! I've searched and found no precompiled versions of the file anywhere (nothing in public/assets)...only the one in assets/stylesheets which I have been modifying. Everything looks fine as far as the directories within the app go, but then when I start the rails server, load the page, and use the element inspector to look at the stylesheets, it's using an old version of 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' with rules that I have deleted. I've turned of the cache in my browser, and tried it in 4 different browsers too, so I'm pretty sure this isn't a result of browser caching.
The rails asset pipeline just seems to serving a version of the file that doesn't exist! Does anybody have any ideas why this might be happening?
Fixed it.
The asset pipeline was storing a cached version in tmp/cache.
I ran rake tmp:clear, which deleted all the files in there, and then rails served the version of *bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less* that I wanted.
Why the cached version suddenly stopped getting updated is beyond me. Arrghhhh!

Rails 3.1 .css.less caching error

I am quite new with Rails and I am having some irritating problems with caching of css files.
I have a .css.less file with imports inside it. It's the only stylesheet the app includes, so the other files get imported only once and by this unique stylesheet.
One of those imported .css.less stylesheets seems to be cached somewhere, because does not change in the browser when I change it's source.
I can only see the changes I made if I change something in the root stylesheet.
I have the server in development mode, so the caching should be off. I have also used <%= stylesheet_include_tag "style", :cache => false %>
I tried with Chrome and Firefox, with and without clearing their cache too. Always the same result, if I work only on that file the css the page receives when reloaded doesn't have the changes...
I also stopped the server and rm everything in the tmp folder of the app. No changes.
I am using Rails 3.1 with Ruby 1.9.3, with the less-bootstrap-rails gem. Both the root stylesheet and the imported one have .css.less extension.
What am I missing?
Thank you!
This is an area where I think the asset pipeline is broken, but I don't think there's a good fix.
If I remember correctly, to get changes in files you've included/required in your .css.less file, you need to change the .css.less file itself.
I had this on Rails 4.0.8, infuriating. The config changes mentioned above didn't help. Here's what seems to have fixed it for me:
Ensure NO FILES share a base name. For example, you have a reports.css.less and a reports.js.coffee? Doesn't matter if they're in the same directory or not. Rename or delete one of them. (I changed it to reports-styles.css.less).
Blow away your cache: rm -rf tmp/cache
Restart your Rails app.
This appears to be a decent fix but, since I don't know what's actually going on, this could be totally false and it's just working by coincidence now. Sorry this answer isn't more rigorous!
I've just came across the exact same problem.
I found that if you rename your *.css.less file (the one with the imports inside) to *.less, then this weird cacheing problem gets resolved.
Add this to your config/application.rb
# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets
config.assets.version = '1.0'
See more at: Ruby on Rails Guide: Asset Pipeline

Rails 3.1 and Image Assets

I have put all my images for my admin theme in the assets folder within a folder called admin. Then I link to it like normal ie.
# Ruby
image_tag "admin/file.jpg" .....
#CSS
.logo{ background:url('/assets/images/admin/logo.png');
FYI. Just for testing I am not using the asset_path tag just yet as I have not compiled my assets.
Ok all good so far until I decided to update an image. I replaced some colors but on reload the new styled image is not showing. If I view the image directly in the browser its still showing the old image. Going one step further I destroyed the admin images folder. But it has broken nothing all the images are still being displayed. And yes I have cleared my cache and have tried on multiple browsers.
Is there some sort of image caching going on? This is just local development using pow to serve the pages.
Even destroying the whole images folder the images are still being served.
Am I missing something?
In 3.1 you just get rid of the 'images' part of the path. So an image that lives in /assets/images/example.png will actually be accessible in a get request at this url - /assets/example.png
Because the assets/images folder gets generated along with a new 3.1 app, this is the convention that they probably want you to follow. I think that's where image_tag will look for it, but I haven't tested that yet.
Also, during the RailsConf keynote, I remember D2h saying the the public folder should not have much in it anymore, mostly just error pages and a favicon.
You'll want to change the extension of your css file from .css.scss to .css.scss.erb and do:
background-image:url(<%=asset_path "admin/logo.png"%>);
You may need to do a "hard refresh" to see changes. CMD+SHIFT+R on OSX browsers.
In production, make sure
rm -rf public/assets
bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production
happens upon deployment.
For what it's worth, when I did this I found that no folder should be include in the path in the css file. For instance if I have app/assets/images/example.png, and I put this in my css file...
div.example { background: url('example.png'); }
... then somehow it magically works. I figured this out by running the rake assets:precompile task, which just sucks everything out of all your load paths and dumps it in a junk drawer folder: public/assets. That's ironic, IMO...
In any case this means you don't need to put any folder paths, everything in your assets folders will all end up living in one huge directory. How this system resolves file name conflicts is unclear, you may need to be careful about that.
Kind of frustrating there aren't better docs out there for this big of a change.
In rails 4 you can now use a css and sass helper image-url:
div.logo {background-image: image-url("logo.png");}
If your background images aren't showing up consider looking at how you're referencing them in your stylesheets.
when referencing images in CSS or in an IMG tag, use image-name.jpg
while the image is really located under ./assets/images/image-name.jpg
http://railscasts.com/episodes/279-understanding-the-asset-pipeline
This railscast (Rails Tutorial video on asset pipeline) helps a lot to explain the paths in assets pipeline as well. I found it pretty useful, and actually watched it a few times.
The solution I chose is #Lee McAlilly's above, but this railscast helped me to understand why it works. Hope it helps!
The asset pipeline in rails offers a method for this exact thing.
You simply add image_path('image filename') to your css or scss file and rails takes care of everything. For example:
.logo{ background:url(image_path('admin/logo.png'));
(note that it works just like in a .erb view, and you don't use "/assets" or "/assets/images" in the path)
Rails also offers other helper methods, and there's another answer here: How do I use reference images in Sass when using Rails 3.1?

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