Redmine 3.3.0 (ruby on rails 4.2.6) stylesheets not generated/included in application.css

Question

I have installed redmine, managed to get it started but the UI seems to be missing it's css styles. If I follow the link for application[SomeId].css It show me an empty css containing the following message:

 /*
 * This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into application.css, which will include all the files
 * listed below.
 *
 * Any CSS and SCSS file within this directory, lib/assets/stylesheets, vendor/assets/stylesheets,
 * or any plugin's vendor/assets/stylesheets directory can be referenced here using a relative path.
 *
 * You're free to add application-wide styles to this file and they'll appear at the bottom of the
 * compiled file so the styles you add here take precedence over styles defined in any styles
 * defined in the other CSS/SCSS files in this directory. It is generally better to create a new
 * file per style scope.
 *
 */

production.log seems fine

  Processing by WelcomeController#index as HTML
  Current user: anonymous
  Rendered welcome/index.html.erb within layouts/base (1.0ms)
Completed 200 OK in 18ms (Views: 9.4ms | ActiveRecord: 4.0ms)
Started GET "/assets/application-e80e8f2318043e8af94dddc2adad5a4f09739a8ebb323b3ab31cd71d45fd9113.css" for ::1 at 2016-09-16 01:34:36 +0300
Started GET "/assets/application-c2899b9307d416d19b1525a85be8085b93df756e91a5b0ee50ab1333f5ade73a.js" for ::1 at 2016-09-16 01:34:36 +0300

.htaccess

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
    AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
</IfModule>
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>Rails application failed to start properly"

• redmine 3.3.0
• ruby 2.2.4
• rails 4.2.6
• latest xampp xampp-win32-7.0.9-1-VC14-installer

Any idea on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Apparently my blunder was that I didn't run 'Redmine' at all in development mode. As I understand until now, the ruby on rails asset pipeline wasn't fired up to generate the concatenated application.css. All I had to do was to run the server once in development mode.

rake assets:precompile
rails server -e development

Also found some useful info in this answer: Rails assets not precompiling, css looks different in production and Rails 4: assets not loading in production

This is my first encounter with RoR and I blindly followed an install tutorial for 'Redmine' that didn't include the compile step.

Edit The issue returned, actually it wasn't even fixed properly. Had to solve some issues with mysql2 adapter and login credentials in order to properly populate the database. After that I tried a lot of things until finally arriving to this steps list:

Added in environments/production.rb

config.serve_static_files = true
config.assets.compile = true
config.assets.precompile =  ['*.js', '*.css', '*.css.erb'] 
config.assets.digest = true

• Kill the server
• Clear out tmp/cache/assets
• Delete public/assets
• Run rake assets:precompile
• Start up the server rails s -e production
• Reloading the page

Run in cmd:

set RAILS_ENV=production
rake generate_secret_token

set RAILS_ENV=production
rake db:migrate

set RAILS_ENV=production
rake redmine:load_default_data

set RAILS_ENV=production
rake tmp:cache:clear

set RAILS_ENV=production
rake assets:precompile

set RAILS_ENV=production
rails server -e development

If I visited the page and opened up web inspector, when I clicked the elink for application.css I still got the empty .css

Eventually I figured out that instead that the gziped version had a size of 1kb which was intriguing. I deleted it and VOILA, it worked. Basically I solved my issue, but I still don't know why the gzip is generated with the empty css.