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

change your Production.rb file line

config.assets.compile = false

into

config.assets.compile = true

and also add

config.assets.precompile =  ['*.js', '*.css', '*.css.erb']

Answer 2

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;
  }
  

Answer 3

If precompile is set you DO NOT need

config.assets.compile = true

as this is to serve assets live.

Our problem was we only had development secret key base set in config/secrets.yml

development:
    secret_key_base: '83d141eeb181032f4070ae7b1b27d9ff'

Need entry for production environment

Answer 4

What you SHOULD NOT do:

Some of my colleagues above have recommended you to do this:

config.serve_static_assets = true  ## DON”T DO THIS!! 
config.public_file_server.enabled = true ## DON”T DO THIS!!

The rails asset pipeline says of the above approach:

This mode uses more memory, performs more poorly than the default and is not recommended. See here: (http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#live-compilation)

What you SHOULD do:

Precompile your assets.

RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile

You can probably do that with a rake task.

Answer 5

Found this:

The configuration option config.serve_static_assets has been renamed to config.serve_static_files to clarify its role.

in config/environments/production.rb:

# Disable serving static files from the `/public` folder by default since
# Apache or NGINX already handles this.
config.serve_static_files = ENV['RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES'].present?

So set env RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES or using Nginx to serving static files. Add config.serve_static_assets = true will still work, but removed in future.

Answer 6

For Rails 5, you should enable the follow config code:

config.public_file_server.enabled = true

By default, Rails 5 ships with this line of config:

config.public_file_server.enabled = ENV['RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES'].present?

Hence, you will need to set the environment variable RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES to true.