Rails 4: assets not loading in production

Question

I\'m trying to put my app into production and image and css asset paths aren\'t working.

Here\'s what I\'m currently doing:

• Image assets live in /app/a

Answer 1

There are 2 things you must accomplish to serve the assets in production:

1. Precompile the assets.
2. Serve the assets on the server to browser.

1) In order to precompile the assets, you have several choices.

• You can run rake assets:precompile on your local machine, commit it to source code control (git), then run the deployment program, for example capistrano. This is not a good way to commit precompiled assets to SCM.

• You can write a rake task that run RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile on the target servers each time you deploy your Rails app to production, before you restart the server.

Code in a task for capistrano will look similar to this:

on roles(:app) do
  if DEPLOY_ENV == 'production'
    execute("cd #{DEPLOY_TO_DIR}/current && RAILS_ENV=production rvm #{ruby_string} do rake assets:precompile")
  end
end

2) Now, you have the assets on production servers, you need to serve them to browser.

Again, you have several choices.

• Turn on Rails static file serving in config/environments/production.rb

  config.serve_static_assets = true # old
  
  or
  
  config.serve_static_files = true # new
  

  Using Rails to serve static files will kill your Rails app performance.

• Configure nginx (or Apache) to serve static files.

  For example, my nginx that was configured to work with Puma looks like this:

  location ~ ^/(assets|images|fonts)/(.*)$ {
      alias /var/www/foster_care/current/public/$1/$2;
      gzip on;
      expires max;
      add_header Cache-Control public;
  }