Rake assets:precompile gets killed when there is a console session open in production

Question

On my production server, which is hosted on digital ocean, if that helps, Ubuntu 12.04, I have RoR 4 and rake 10.1.1.

When I deploy, I run rake assets:precompi

Answer 1

Your precompile process is probably being killed because you are running out of RAM. You can confirm this by running top in another ssh session. To fix this, create a swap file that will be used when RAM is full.

Create SWAP Space on Ubuntu You will probably end up needing some swap space if you plan on using Rails on Digital Ocean 512MB RAM droplet. Specifically, you will run out of RAM when compiling the assets resulting in the process being quietly killed and preventing successful deployments.

To see if you have a swap files:

sudo swapon -s

No swap file shown? Check how much disk space space you have:

 df

To create a swap file:

Step 1: Allocate a file for swap

sudo fallocate -l 2048m /mnt/swap_file.swap

Step 2: Change permission

sudo chmod 600 /mnt/swap_file.swap

Step 3: Format the file for swapping device

sudo mkswap /mnt/swap_file.swap

Step 4: Enable the swap

sudo swapon /mnt/swap_file.swap

Step 5: Make sure the swap is mounted when you Reboot. First, open fstab

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Finally, add entry in fstab (only if it wasn't automatically added)

# /etc/fstab
/mnt/swap_file.swap none swap sw 0 0 

Save and exit. You're done adding swap. Now your rake assets:precompile should complete without being killed.