Question

I am deploying to heroku yet I saw that the css files aren’t being served (they also cannot be found on heroku).

I read that I need to do rake assets:precompile locally at first yet when I do it I get:

C:\project>bundle exec rake assets:precompile --trace

** Invoke assets:precompile (first_time)
** Execute assets:precompile
rake aborted!
undefined: Unexpected token: operator (<)
  (in C:/project/app/assets/javascripts/application.js)

Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

I have nothing in application.js so I don’t understand where the error is..

application.js is

// This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into including all the files listed below.
// Add new JavaScript/Coffee code in separate files in this directory and they'll automatically
// be included in the compiled file accessible from http://example.com/assets/application.js
// It's not advisable to add code directly here, but if you do, it'll appear at the bottom of the
// the compiled file.
//
//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree .

Thank you

Update

If removing a .js.erb file I get the following error

C:\project>bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production --trace
** Invoke assets:precompile (first_time)
** Execute assets:precompile
rake aborted!
706: unexpected token at 'C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Temp\execjs20111021-6448-ei2nm3.js(2, 3) Microsoft JScript runtime error: Out of memory

'
  (in C:/project/app/assets/javascripts/application.js)

Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

Still have problems with erb css and js files not compiling…

This doesn’t seem to end..
Thanks

Answer 1

I think it is caused by an external javascript file which is not well-code-formatted. e.g.

function say_hi(){
  // NOTICE that there's no semi-colon there!
  name = "Jim"
  alert("hi" + name )
}

when under the precompile, your code would put in 1 line, and since there’s no necessary semicolon, your generated js file probably contains errors, like

"undefined: Unexpected token: operator (<)" 

or something.

so, my suggestion is:

1. don’t compress the js file if it’s not well code-formatted, by setting “config.assets.compress = false” in your config file, following @Mike’s answer.

2. use coffeescript as possible, it will help you generate very well formatted code. ( I am not a coffeescript guru, so please correct me if I am wrong )