When changing to a production deployment with a single rails instance, NOT proxied, errors showed up on the console, and of course .js and .css files were not served as a result:
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/javascripts/application.js"):
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/favicon.ico"):
Solution: in config/environments/production.rb:
# Disable Rails's static asset server # In production, Apache or nginx will already do this # config.serve_static_assets = false
The key is to comment the third line.
I know: using Mongrel for production isn't recommended, to say the least. I'm just posting the info so if you try it, you'll know why it's behaving differently.