I have both .js and .coffee files in my /app/assets/javascripts/ folder. The .coffee files will not run unless I call rake assets:precompile, which is a pain because I have to do rake assets:clean and precompile them again whenever I make a change.
Also, the precompiled .js file is included in addition to the source files, which causes double event handlers and all that good stuff.
My understanding is that the coffeescript should be compiled to javascript upon each request if it's not precompiled, but it doesn't seem to be doing so. I can't find the compiled script loading in Firebug, and I don't see its behavior, at least.
My /config/application.rb has the following line configured:
# Enable the asset pipeline
config.assets.enabled = true
What else is there to check?
I am using Rails 3.2.3.
If you precompile on your local machine, then you can commit these generated assets into the repository and proceed with deployment. No need to compile them on production machine.
But it introduces a problem: now when you change source files (coffescript / scss), the app won't pick up the changes, because it will serve precompiled files instead. rake assets:clean deletes these precompiled files.
from https://stackoverflow.com/a/9335864/643500
What I usually do if I want the assets to precompile on the production server to pickup the new changes every build is just clean the assets - once of course unless you re-precompile them
rake assets:clean
When the changes are made and you don't want to precompile them every build do
rake assets:clean
rake assets:precompile
Related
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.
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.
Could somebody explain to me what the command rake assets:clean really does? Unfortunately the Rails Guides dont mention it. There is also the command rake assets:cleanup. Whats the difference?
Furthermore could somebody tell me when do I have to run rake assets:precompile in production. Do I run it on the server console after I deployed all my application files to my production server? Or do I precompile on my local machine and then do a deploy of all files?
Thanks all
Note: This answer is rails 3 specific. For rails 4 and later, look at other answers here.
If you precompile on your local machine, then you can commit these generated assets into the repository and proceed with deployment. No need to compile them on production machine.
But it introduces a problem: now when you change source files (coffescript / scss), the app won't pick up the changes, because it will serve precompiled files instead. rake assets:clean deletes these precompiled files.
In my projects assets are precompiled as a part of deployment. Capistrano makes it very easy.
Also, I never heard of rake assets:cleanup.
Run rake assets:clobber to actually clean the assets.
http://www.dixis.com/?p=735
Sergio's answer was completely correct in Rails 3. rake assets:clean deleted all assets that had been previously precompiled into the public/assets directory.
In Rails 4, you run rake assets:clobber to do the same thing.
If you run rake assets:precompile with the following config (by default turned on in staging and production):
# config/environments/production.rb
config.assets.digest = true
You compiled assets get timestamped. This means you can compile your new assets while leaving the old assets in place. You usually want to do this in production so you website will still access the old files while your running precompile to create your new files (because you've added new css/javascript). You now want to get rid of the old files that are no longer in use. The clean it removes the old versions of the precompiled assets while leaving the new assets in place.
rake assets:clean removes compiled assets. It is run by cap deploy:assets:clean to remove compiled assets, generally from a remote server.
cap deploy:clean removes old releases, generally from a remote server. It is not rake assets:clean
rake != cap
rake assets:clean is now run by cap deploy:cleanup_assets. Add require 'capistrano/rails/assets' to your Capfile and you get this cap-task. My capistrano version is v3.2.1.
clean up those untracked files with git clean -f for files and git clean -f -d for directories
I prefer not to concatenate JavaScript files in development mode, but serve them as individual files. So I configured:
development.rb:
config.assets.compress = false
config.assets.debug = true
config.assets.compile = true
In my /app/assets/javascript directory I have:
reviews.js
reviews/
foo.js
bar.js
reviews.js:
//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree ./reviews
I include the JavaScript using <%= javascript_include_tag "reviews" %> in my layout. The generated page correctly references the three scripts individually and reviews.js is essentially empty. So far so good.
Now when I precompile my assets for production using rake assets:precompile the three JavaScript files are concatenated into reviews.js. This is all fine for production but now, in development mode, the concatenated reviews.js is served in addition to the two individual files.
Of course, this leads to all kinds of nasty bugs when developing because now, the content of foo.js and bar.js is served twice, one of them in a potentially older version in reviews.js.
How can I make sure Rails doesn't use the precompiled assets in development mode?
In config/environments/development.rb set:
config.assets.prefix = "/assets_dev"
so that in development mode Rails will look there (but it will not find anything, as you will not compile assets in development (this is indeed what you are trying to do -- not compile assets)).
When precompiling for production, use
RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile
so it compiles into the default assets folder, public/assets.
It sounds like you are precompiling locally. Because the files exist in the expected location they are being served by your dev server, and the requests are not going to Sprockets.
The only way to stop this is delete the compiled files.
Normally you do not need to compile locally. It is expected that in almost all cases the precompile task will be run during deployment of the app. There is a Capistrano recipe for this on the asset pipeline guide page.
If you do need to have those files locally committed to your repo you could use a branch to avoid the problem. Reserve your master branch for production code, and make a second branch for dev. Only compile and commit assets on master. When you switch to dev, they will be gone. Merge dev into master as required.
Edit: Make sure you force your browser to update (control + F5) or you may find the old assets used from the browser cache!
in config/environments/development.rb set:
config.serve_static_assets = false
and no files from /public will be served
I tried this and it worked. rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production
I observed that the new version of assets pipeline does this when you run rake assets:precompile does rake assets:precompile:all