Rails App Not Serving Assets in Production Environment

Question

My app works fine when run in development environment. In production (rails server -e production), the browser can\'t access the css and js files and on the con

Answer 1

Check for a file like this:

public/assets/.sprockets-manifest-3f7771d777ceb581d754e4fad88aa69c.json

If you are pushing precompiled assets to a production server there is a chance that you are preventing hidden 'dot' files being pushed and this essential file won't make it into production.

In my environment I need to precompile assets in an integration environment and push these to production so that there is no need to compile the assets on the production machine. I was erroneously blocking all hidden files from being pushed to production machine.

To see if this answer works for you, check your generated HTML source in a browser from the production server to see if the assets path has been generated. If you see your script tag like this:

<script data-turbolinks-track="true" src="/javascripts/application.js"></script>

check the src attribute. It should start with /assets/javascript. In this case it starts with /javascript which indicates Rails does not think any of the assets have been precompiled.

I corrected this by updating my push to production (currently rsync), ensuring I push the .sprockets-manifest* file after precompiling on my integration server.

Also, I use standalone Passenger as my integration test server, rather than Webrick, since it handles more realistic serving of static files.

Answer 2

This sounds like to the problem I was having.

I found a blog that suggests this is a bug in the Rails 4.0.0 asset pipeline, and is inexplicably mitigated by setting...

config.assets.compile = true

... in config/environments/production.rb

Aside from somehow kicking the asset pipeline in to actually working, that setting will turn on live-compilation of assets. That is normally a bad thing for performance in production, but if you still manually precompile assets when you deploy, with

rake assets:precompile

... the live-compilation should never happen (because the necessary assets have already been precompiled).

I hope this helps :)

Answer 3

In production.rb change the setting:

rails 3.x

config.serve_static_assets = true

rails 4.x

config.serve_static_files = true

Answer 4

The following command works for me locally.

rails server -e production

I got the same error "ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets/application.css"" while running "rails s". Even after I precompiled the source, change config precompile true. It still could not load properly.

The option "-e production" made those RoutingError disappear.

Answer 5

As previously noted config.serve_static_assets is deprecated and replaced by config.serve_static_files. If one examines config/environments/production.rb for Rails-4.2 then one finds this:

  # 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?

The implication being that setting and exporting (in BASH) the environment variable export RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES="to any value whatsoever" in a session prior to running rails s -e production will give the desired result when testing locally and also will avoid having to remember to recode production.rb before pushing to the production host.

Answer 6

in Rails 5.x the setting is

config/initializers/assets.rb:

Rails.application.config.public_file_server.enabled = true

https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html