When working in development mode (using webrick) it is painful waiting for pages to load when there are a lot of css and js assets that are loaded one by one.
This has annoyed me for years but today it dawned on me how easy the fix is. I’m using Rails 4.1.x
in development.rb
Add the digest to assets
config.assets.digest = true
and then add middleware that caches assets for a year (in development.rb only, in prod we cache via apache/nginx).
config.middleware.use CacheAssets
My CacheAssets class looks like so
class CacheAssets def initialize app @app = app end
def call env res = @app.call(env) path = env[“REQUEST_PATH”] if path =~ /assets/ if res[0] == 200 res[1][“Expires”] = (Time.now + 1.year).utc.rfc2822 res[1][“Cache-Control”] = ‘public’ end return res end res end end
If I edit any CSS or JS file it will get a new digest key so there is no need to clear the cache to pick up my latest changes while developing.
In the interest of making the development environment faster by default, maybe this should be baked into Rails 5? disclaimer, i haven’t used Rails 5 yet so maybe something like this is already there.
Thoughts? Tony