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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T06:38:45+00:00

I have a Rails (3.1.3 with asset pipeline) application that will be deployed as

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I have a Rails (3.1.3 with asset pipeline) application that will be deployed as a war. This application has ui “themes”. Internally, I just have .scss files (Sass) in the assets directory of the Rails application and I let the user switch between them.

I’d like to allow administrators to add themes(basically .scss files) to the application after it has been deployed as a war. How can I allow the functionality without requiring the war be rebuilt/recompiled (using warbler). Ideally, they would be able to add themes without having to do anything with the war file.

I have a similar concern for language files. How can someone dynamically add a language file to a deployed Rails application?

I’m currently pre-compiling assets, namely the themes written using Sass, in production, but I’m open to changing this if it’ll helps solve this issue. Can I precompile asssets outside of the war? Is it possible to set the path of the asset pipeline to outside the war?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Disclaimer: I’m not familiar with WAR at all. My answer may be completely wrong because I have no experience with it. Please understand that I found this to be an interesting challenge and I wanted to find a solution.

    I can’t tell if when you create a WAR archive what the application is capable of doing. As a result I decided to use command line to do the actual compiling. However, it shouldn’t be too difficult to include the sass gem and use the compiler directly if needed.

    Because I rely on the command line you have to install the sass gem. Then see the README on using the command line interface.

    For testing, I created a model called Theme with the following columns. You may need to change the code below to match the model you have in place.

    1. (string) title # the title of the theme
    2. (string) stylesheet_file_name # the name of the file that is saved

    Inside of my form I used a different field name to prevent overlapping.

    <%= f.form_field :styleheet %>

    Then inside of my controller I added the code to compile the uploaded scss file and move it into the public directory.

    def create
  if params[:theme].has_key?(:stylesheet)

    # create a filename friendly version of the theme name
    file_name = params[:theme][:stylesheet_file_name] = params[:theme][:title].parameterize

    # where to copy the temporary uploaded file to. It is important that we get
    # the original extension. The `sass` command uses the extension to determine how to compile the file
    tmp_file = "#{Rails.root}/tmp/#{params[:theme][:stylesheet].original_filename}"

    # move from /tmp path to within the Rails temp directory
    `cp #{params[:theme][:stylesheet].tempfile.path} #{tmp_file}`

    # create the theme's css file.
    File.open("#{Rails.root}/public/stylesheets/#{file_name}.css", 'w') do |f|

      # compile the .scss file via command line
      parsed_theme = `sass #{tmp_file}`

      # store the contents of the file
      f.write(parsed_theme)
    end

    # remove the temporary file we created earlier
    `rm #{tmp_file}`

    # this key wasn't part of my AR model
    params[:theme].delete("stylesheet")
  end

  # rest of action here ...
end

    Once you have the css file in place you can include it in your layout/application.html.erb file with the following.

    <head>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "/stylesheets/#{@current_theme.stylesheet_file_name}" %>
</head>
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