I'm just learning the new asset pipeline in Rails 3.1. One particular problem I'm having is with the way Sprockets just mashes all the found CSS stylesheets into one massive stylesheet. I understand why this is advantageous over manually merging stylesheets and minifying for production. But I want to be able to selectively cascade stylesheets instead of having all rules all mashed together. For instance, I want:
master.css
to be loaded by all pages in the Rails app, but I want
admin.css only to be loaded by pages/views within the admin section/namespace.
How can I take advantage of the great way that Rails 3.1 combines stylesheets and minifies them for production, but also have the former flexibility of being able to load only certain stylesheet combinations per layout?
Or should this be done by adding a class to body tags in layouts-
body class="admin"
And then target style rules as appropriate. Using SASS scoped selectors this might be a reasonable solution.
This is how i solved the styling issue: (excuse the Haml)
%div{:id => "#{params[:controller].parameterize} #{params[:view]}"}
= yield
This way i start all the page specific .css.sass files with:
#post
/* Controller specific code here */
&#index
/* View specific code here */
&#new
&#edit
&#show
This way you can easily avoid any clashes.
Hope this helped some.
I have a post about this on my website:
Leveraging Rails 3.1, SCSS, and the assets pipeline to differentiate your stylesheets
And check out this answer to another question: Using Rails 3.1 assets pipeline to conditionally use certain css
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Lasse
#nathanvda: sure...
We make use of multiple layout files. So in our app/views/layouts, instead of having just application.html.haml (we use HAML), we actually ignore the application layout and use 3 custom layouts:
admin.html.haml (admin section views only)
registered.html.haml (registered/signed in users views only)
unregistered.html.haml (unregistered/unsigned in users views only)
So at the top of my admin.html.haml file I will have my stylesheet link tags to a separate admin.scss (we use SCSS) manifest. That manifest will load any necessary sub-stylesheets just for the admin section. This allows us to specify rules just for the admin section while also making use of common styles. For instance, we use jquery-ui throughout the site, so the styles associated with jquery-ui sit in their own stylesheet and we include them in the manifests for all 3 css manifest files.
This solution doesn't give you a single CSS file that can be cached, but it ends up giving you 3 CSS files, each of which can be cached. This allows a tradeoff between performance and some flexibility in organizing CSS rules so we don't have to worry about CSS rule collisions.
The way I've been doing it so far is to have two seperate folders a/ and u/ where a/ is for the admin view and u/ is for the user view. Then in the layout I point to the appropriate application.css with assets/u/application.css(js). Bit of a pain having to move the auto generated files each time but a lot less than having to require each file individually in the manifest.
I use something like
application.html.erb
">
show.html.erb
content_for :body_id do
page_specific_body_id
end
Related
What I mean when I ask this is, "Is there a way that an individual view can load w/ specific stylesheets and resources?".
Now, I'm not referring to the classic usages of script and link HTML tags to reference resources, primarily because when Rails loads, it precompiles ALL of the available assets provided.
The main reason I want to do this is because after a while I find that there are so many good web development frameworks out there that it can be very fun to mix and match various ones, and it's really hard to target one framework to use all the time. Also, there can usually be a lot of conflict between various frameworks because of like naming systems (e.g. Bootstrap 2 alongside Bootstrap 3).
If I understand ok, you can do the following:
Application layout:
yield :stylesheets if content_for? :stylesheets
In specific view:
content_for :stylesheet do
= stylesheet_link_tag "specific_style"
Make sure to precompile "specific_style" in application.rb:
config.assets.precompile << ['application.css', 'specific_style.css']
I work with front-end designers that give me a bunch of HTML & CSS files. There are some things that are very straight forward - like CSS for Twitter Bootstrap or any other framework.
But when the designer has created a bunch of other stylesheets, should I just include them in the stylesheets directory or should I just copy all the styles to the main application.css file?
Is this just a matter of style or does my approach really (or not) matter with the asset pipeline?
Thanks.
The approach doesn't usually matter, but it can matter if you do not want to include everything in one stylesheet link on the final page. I'd strongly recommend keeping the stylesheets separated for the same reason you keep code separated. Easier maintenance, less conceptual overhead per file, and easier to find where to make the change you need to make.
Even though they get combined by the asset pipeline, I tend to do one stylesheet per controller, or component, with certain shared styles (navigation, forms, common UI forms) in their own file. I haven't found the perfect solution yet (I still struggle with wanting "DRYer" stylesheets), but this works pretty well.
application.css is ment to organize css file, i remember there are comments on the top of the application.css telling not to directly write css file inside it. You should create a new css file for those style-sheet content your front-end guy gave you. And as application.css will include all the files under the stylestheet folder automatically. It will work.
I would like to know what are the best ways to organise CSS code in Rails project?
I'm interested in how you do it and why.
If you would like to break up your css into multiple files during development you can add cache => true to stylesheet_link_tag and rails will automatically concatenate them into a single file in production. This also works for javascript_include_tag.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#linking-to-javascript-files-with-javascript_include_tag
Generally, you should not have the client download a massive amount of CSS snippets, but pack them into a single file on the server to avoid rendering latencies. So you have the tradeoff of having functionality divided up into multiple files put wanting to send only one file to the client.
You could use SASS to have each piece of code inside a single include file and just include all of them together. This gives you the added advantage of mixins (kind of like macros) and variables among other awesome things.
Another possibility would be to use plain CSS and use something like Jammit to pack the stuff up to send to the client.
Regarding actual setups, I tend to have one file resetting the styles to a known default, a file for the basic layout (columns, default spaces, ...), and one file each for each area of concern for your specific design (headers, buttons, ...)
James and Holger's answers are very good.
Besides organizing CSS in my projects, I also had to change colour schemes a couple of times..
Trying to do consistent changes throughout many CSS files can be pretty painful (results may vary).
I ended up extending the Rails start-up procedure a little, to include a custom module "site_settings.rb"
through which I can define variable for colors and other CSS attributes, which I can then use throughout my CSS input files.
Whenever Rails starts up, and one of the input files has changed, it auto-generates the CSS files.
http://unixgods.org/~tilo/Ruby/Using_Variables_in_CSS_Files_with_Ruby_on_Rails.html
Since Rails 3.1 is out and sprockets replaced Jammit, here an excerpt form the Rails guides concerning the asset organization:
Asset Organization
Assets can be placed inside an application in one of three locations: app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets.
app/assets is for assets that are owned by the application, such as custom images, JavaScript files or stylesheets.
lib/assets is for your own libraries’ code that doesn’t really fit into the scope of the application or those libraries which are shared across applications.
vendor/assets is for assets that are owned by outside entities, such as code for JavaScript plugins.
I am creating a custom CSS stylesheet for a Rails 3 application.
Is there a list anywhere of the CSS styles that Rails relies upon? So far I have found:
#notice
#error_explanation
.field_with_errors
Many thanks.
The css for the flash-messages you can choose yourself, as they are normally defined in application.html.erb (there is no default definition for flash-messages in rails 3).
For form-styling i would recommend using a gem like formtastic, which not only greatly simplifies making forms, but also provides a standard css file. So all needed tags are then known (and can be overwritten if needed).
If on the other hand you are looking at ways to get your complete layout started quickly, you might want to checkout web-app-theme or activo (which is even more complete).
A fresh Rails 3 app will not require any specific CSS class/id styles beyond the three you just mentioned, which is why no default stylesheet is generated until you start scaffolding.
If you run script/rails generate scaffold MyModel it will create a stylesheet called scaffold.css which the generated views will rely upon.
i am creating a cms / portal that i want each user to change certain css properise ie colors, widths, backgrounds etc to customise there own version of my site.
What is the best way to do this ? i have looked into sass but not sure if this is possible from front end as the css would need to be recompiled each time etc ?
Any one done this or got any suggestions please help.
thanks
rick
You can use sass if you like, but it's possible to do this using plain CSS too. Use whichever you prefer. Sass doesn't need to be recompiled for each request, it can be either:
Pre-compiled at deploy time
Served from a controller and page-cached
If you want your users to edit only certain properties then you can use a standard MVC approach to serve your stylesheets with page caching:
Create a stylesheet model with the columns you want to have editable.
Provide your users a form to manage their stylesheet (there are some good jQuery plugins for color selectors, etc.)
Serve the stylesheets from a controller (e.g. routed to /users/1/stylesheet.css)
Cache the stylesheet output using caches_page so it gets served statically on future requests.
Let the user edit an .scss file.
Use codemirror for editing.
SASS/SCSS: http://sass-lang.com/
CodeMirror: http://codemirror.net/csstest.html