What I want is really simple - I want all assets except a particular css file (that references image assets and thus needs to go through the asset pipeline) to be precompiled. How do I exclude that css file from being precompiled?
There are a couple possible answers depending on what you want. I'm not quite sure what you're asking.
If it's in app/assets, you really need anything in there to go through the asset pipeline to be available. In production, you need to precompile all your assets in that are part of the asset pipeline -- and need to re-precompile in production mode whenever they change.
If the asset name doesn't have a scss or sass suffix, it won't go through the scss/sass compiler, although it'll still go through the asset pipeline for fingerprinting in filename, gzipping, etc.
If you really don't want an asset to go through the asset pipeline at all, then you can't really put it in app/assets. You have to put it in public instead. Then it gets confusing how to generate a URL to it, the best way is to use public_path + "/subdir/foo.css".
But I'm not sure that's what you're asking. If you have an asset file that references image paths, normally you do need that to through the asset pipeline, absolutely! Because it's the asset pipeline that will fill out the URLs properly for those image assets. You'll want to use the Rails asset_path helper in the asset file to generate the URL to an image. You can put an .erb on the end of the file, and then use ERB codes <%= asset_path('my_asset.css') %> in it it. Or if it's sass,asset_path` might be built into rails sass already, I forget.
I don't fully understand what problem you are having exactly, but I think what you are asking for may not actually be what you need. Have you checked out the Rails Asset Pipeline guide? It's pretty decent. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html
It sounds like you actually want a file precompiled separately from the other files?
If so you just need to add it to the Rails.application.config.assets.precompile array. Look in config/initializers/assets.rb for a commented line as an example.
Related
I have a problem with certain assets on heroku. (local environment is working fine)
The assets are in the pipeline. If I execute in the heroku rails console:
helper.asset_path("typicons.woff")
helper.asset_path("backgrounds/1.jpg")
I get the following response:
/assets/typicons-c2430aad2b6a33948dc064cfaee8ad65ff9e3ca439834f3aaa84abec3d10dea8.woff
/assets/backgrounds/1-c2098ff7e7fbb89b2d18e9cd9089f712f2b837265d1d2e4182c36c23392760c6.jpg
So I assume that the assets are in the heroku asset pipeline. As well by opening the url directly with the digest in it, I receive the file.
However if I try to reference the files in css or javascript like this:
$('.top-content').backstretch("/assets/backgrounds/1.jpg");
The file does not load. As well opening /assets/backgrounds/1.jpg directly does not work. Referencing assets from .rb or .erb files works.
Please can someone tell me, what kind of config I have to change, so the URLs for assets work as well without the digest?
Thank you!
Assuming you are using a fairly standard asset pipeline setup, this passage from the Rails Guides should help:
If you add an erb extension to a JavaScript asset, making it something such as application.js.erb, you can then use the asset_path helper in your JavaScript code:
-- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html (section 2.3.3)
In your example, add the erb extension to your JS file and then change the line to
$('.top-content').backstretch(<%= asset_path("backgrounds/1.jpg") %>);
The problem is that Rails 4 does not support non-digested assets at all.(For whatever reason)
Here is a more thorough explanation on the issue: Non Digested Asset Names in Rails 4
My personal workaround was to add a public asset folder to my app:
public/assets/static/
and upload the assets required there. Since it was only about fonts and background images, which do not change often, it does not seem to be a problem. In the link above there are several other solutions proposed.
I'm just getting into the Asset Pipeline; I'm using SASS/SCSS, but I'm not understanding why I should be using the Asset Helpers.
For example, if I have some CSS/SCSS without using an Asset Helper:
background-image: url('rails.png');
This will work fine because both my .SCSS file and image are in and accessible through the assets directory.
What's the point of doing this?:
background-image: asset-url("rails.png", image);
I understand it will add "/assets/" to the url, but why should I be using the Asset Helpers if the standard CSS way will work?
I think I'm missing something. Does it have something to do with deploying to production?
Using the helpers gives you access to the finger printed URLs in production. From the Asset Pipeline guide:
In the production environment Rails uses the fingerprinting scheme outlined above. By default it is assumed that assets have been precompiled and will be served as static assets by your web server.
During the precompilation phase an MD5 is generated from the contents of the compiled files, and inserted into the filenames as they are written to disc. These fingerprinted names are used by the Rails helpers in place of the manifest name.
So in production, the paths have an MD5 appended and you have things like this:
/assets/pancakes-af27b6a414e6da00003503148be9b409.png
With the checksums in place, Rails can tell browsers to cache these files forever. Then, if you do a new release that changes one of your assets, the checksum changes and that changes the whole path; the new path makes the browser think it is a whole new file so it will fetch it again. Without the checksums you can easily get old files stuck in browser caches and that sort of thing isn't exactly a happy fun time.
I am wondering if it is just my lack of understanding. I have a action mailer that using a bunch of asset via the image_tag and config.action_mailer.asset_host in the config. As I am using the assets pipline for my javascripts (with the necessary config) -- and not images and css. ActionMailer views complains that I do not have them pre-compile, which is correct as I don't want to, for various reason. One of which my designer just don't want to embed tags in the css as they do not work with his adobe tools.
So is there a way to to switch off CSS and image processing form sprockets?
Thanks
Charlie
Even if you don't want precompiled assets on your mailing machine, could you transfer public/assets/manifest.yml to it? Otherwise the view helpers won't know where your image path will end up.
Because a jQuery plugin I use in my application has direct references to images, I'm trying to turn off asset fingerprinting.
So I set config.assets.digest = false in my production.rb, but now none of my image references work at all. /assets/foo.png just returns a blank response.
I really don't want to alter the jQuery plugin's code and add erb image helpers, but I'm not sure what else to do. And frankly, the asset fingerprinting for images seems to be much more trouble than it's worth.
Does anybody have any insight?
Thanks!
Someone made a gem for this purpose:
https://github.com/spohlenz/digestion
The asset pipeline is a great new component of Rails 3.1. However it
has a feature known as fingerprinting that makes it impossible to
properly incorporate many popular JavaScript libraries (including
TinyMCE, CKEditor and FancyZoom to name just a few) into the asset
pipeline.
This gem patches the asset pipeline to allow these libraries to be
used, by disabling the fingerprinting functionality for specific files
or paths.
If you are using a large plugin, like ckeditor, then your only real option is to move that plugin into the public directory.
For smaller plugins you can move their images into the correct asset path. For example if your plugin references images/icon.jpg under the plugin folder this would need to be moved to something like app/assets/images/plugin_name/icon.png and then referenced in the plugin with <%= asset_tag('plugin_name/icon.png') %>.
The pipeline IS worth it. Not using digests in production pretty much negates the point of using it at all, which is to set far-future headers so that the asset gets cached somewhere.
If you are set on removing digests then you must precompile the assets (so that Sprockets does not serve them with far-future headers), and make sure no headers are set on the server.
After I deployed my upgraded Rails 2.3.x -> 3.1 (rc4) app to our test environment this afternoon, all of our stylesheets and JavaScript files were returning 404 errors. We had added the rake assets:precompile task to our post-deploy script and it took a while to determine why the assets folder didn't have the pre-compiled files we expected.
In the end, the files weren't being compiled because apparently only application.css and application.js (+ non JS/CSS files) are processed by default.
We needed to change the following configuration value as follows:
config.assets.precompile += %w( *.js *.css )
Question: why isn't this the default?
I would have expected that anything that wasn't necessary to process as a manifest file would just get copied into public/assets. Much of what I've read on the asset pipeline is essentially "stick your assets in app/assets, configure the manifest files, and it should just work". Since the assets:precompile task didn't spit out any information about what it was doing, it took a while to determine that it just wasn't looking at the files we thought it would.
Is there any reason why this would not be a good value for the precompile configuration?
Thanks!
The idea is to have all your JavaScript and CSS always loaded in one shot, rather than loading bits and pieces as you move along. That way you always have the 'world' loaded and ready to work with, rather than having to include a whole bunch of individual files here and there.
It's a bit of a larger 'up front' load, but then the browser should keep loading all the javascript from cache. So the perceived speed of the site should speed up due to having everything cached and ready to go after the first request.
This was a controversial decision to include for Rails, but so is including CoffeeScript by default. Rails has always been an opinionated framework that way.
the new sprockets-based pipeline compiles all the files in /asssets/stylesheets and /assets/javascripts get compiled into application.css and application.js, respectively, by default.
In your views, you only need to link the application files, sprockets handles the rest.
Update:
Well, you don't have to make it all into just one file... You could have an shared.js, secure.js and public.js and have them each include the parts they need...
Think of them not as javascript files, but manifest files that establish groups of javascript files which you can then include as a group with a single javascript_include_tag. While the default is to include everything in the folder into a single file, you can be always pick and choose what to include, and what not.
The 'precompile' task simply runs those manifest files and compiles the multiple files into one, while pre-processing and sass or coffee script it runs across.