Question

For a certain controller/action, I would like to serve only a specific subset of CSS assets. Is such a thing possible?

I want something like this in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<% if newsletter_show? %>
    <%= stylesheet_link_tag    "foo", "bar", "baz" %>
<% else %>
    <%= stylesheet_link_tag    "application" %>
    <%= javascript_include_tag "application" %>
<% end %>

Note: when the condition is true, not only do I serve specific css files (foo, bar, and baz), I also purposely don’t serve javascript.

This works perfectly in development, but in production it fails because apparently we can’t have disjoint stylesheets, since they’re precompiled as a whole. Any way around this?

Answer 1

Option 1 :
If you add foo bar and baz to precompiles, it should work :

In config/application.rb :

config.assets.precompile += %w(foo.css bar.css baz.css)

Option 2 :
You could also create another css grouped file :

In app/assets/stylesheets/newsletter.css :

/*
*= require foo
*= require bar
*= require baz
*/

In config/application.rb :

config.assets.precompile += %w(newsletter.css)

In the view :

<% if newsletter_show? %>    
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'newsletter' %>
#...

Don’t forget to recompile the assets 🙂