Understating how assets in Rails 4 work in production

rubyonrails-talk
1

When I run

rake assets:precompile

The compiled assets are written to pubic/assets:

I, [2013-07-21T02:16:00.987988 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/glyphicons-halflings-white-62b67d9edee3db90d18833087f848d6e.png
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:01.037698 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/glyphicons-halflings-c806376f05e4ccabe2c5315a8e95667c.png
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:01.053630 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/marketing/slider-base/slide-01-b85e542137a02bedd6c30dede873ef1e.jpg
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:01.066371 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/marketing/slider-base/slide-02-e5106e911d8a0289bfaf2ac64308a640.jpg
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:01.077879 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/marketing/slider-base/slide-03-990dccbed4c70f0118b7d30d98094811.jpg
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:01.965560 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/application-98713f9763bccfd6bc05dae422d3e242.js
I, [2013-07-21T02:16:02.068469 #13881] INFO -- : Writing /home/jpereira/dev/saleshub/public/assets/application-a40c2cd9b0f20b2a7f3b62d45159fbb3.css

Then, I start the application in production, with:

RAILS_ENV=
production rails s
=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 4.0.0 application starting in production on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server
[2013-07-21 02:20:49] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2013-07-21 02:20:49] INFO ruby 2.0.0 (2013-06-27) [x86_64-linux]
[2013-07-21 02:20:49] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=13903 port=3000

But the rendered pages, don’t look for the precompiled asses. In the rendered templates I got:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>
  App Home Pagetitle>
<link data-turbolinks-track="true" href="/stylesheets/application.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" />
  <link href="/stylesheets/application.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" />
  <link href="/stylesheets/marketing.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" />
  <script src="/javascripts/application.js"></script>
  <script src="/javascripts/marketing.js"></script>
  <meta content="authenticity_token" name="csrf-param" />
  <meta content="8XQYBZWrTxmfdGvQYCK0JwQDfr2pt8si+FjW4a30SsA=" name="csrf-token" />
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

The template is the following:

!!! 5
%  html
%    head
%title App Home Page
    =yield(:head)
    = stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true
    = stylesheet_link_tag "application", params[:controller], :media => "all"
    = javascript_include_tag "application", params[:controller]
    = csrf_meta_tags
%    body
=flash_messages(flash)
    = yield

My production.rb is as follows:

WebApp::Application.configure do
  config.cache_classes = true
  config.eager_load = true
  config.consider_all_requests_local = false
  config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
  config.serve_static_assets = false
  config.assets.js_compressor = :  uglifier
config.assets.compile = false
  config.assets.digest = true
  config.assets.version = '1.0'
  config.log_level = :  info
config.i18n.fallbacks = true
  config.active_support.deprecation = :  notify
config.log_formatter = ::Logger::Formatter.new

end

What I need to configure to have stylesheet_link_tag and javascript_include_tag pick the right assets location on production?

Thanks

2

When you are using a server that serves directly from your application such as WEBrick or Thin, you will need to set config.serve_static_assets to true in order to have it serve files from the public directory. This inserts middleware into the Rack stack to first check the public directory so it adds overhead.

This is not necessary when you are running through a true web server such as Apache or Nginx as the web server will automatically serve files from the public directory on its own. config.serve_static_assets=true adds overhead to your app so when you deploy to a true web server, it’s generally best to set this to false.