Question

I have a site with the Slidedeck jquery plugin on it. When I serve it locally it works just fine and looks great. After I push it to Heroku, though, it doesn’t work at all.

I’m including all my files using sprockets, and I also use a gem that takes care of themes (themes_for_rails). I have an initializer in config:

 ThemesForRails.config do |config|
  # themes_dir is used to allow ThemesForRails to list available themes. It is not used to resolve any paths or routes.
  config.themes_dir = ":root/app/assets/themes"

  # assets_dir is the path to your theme assets.
  config.assets_dir = ":root/app/assets/themes/halo"

  # views_dir is the path to your theme views
  config.views_dir =  ":root/app/views/themes/halo"

  # themes_routes_dir is the asset pipeline route base. 
  # Because of the way the asset pipeline resolves paths, you do
  # not need to include the 'themes' folder in your route dir.
  #
  # for example, to get application.css for the default theme, 
  # your URL route should be : /assets/default/stylesheets/application.css
  config.themes_routes_dir = "assets"
end

This is in my application.js:

//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree .
//= require_tree ../themes/halo/javascripts

Maybe my problem is that I am using relative paths in Heroku. I don’t know exactly how to do absolute paths, though.

Answer 1

I haven’t used the Slidedeck library before, but here are some things to look into to narrow down your bug source:

• Javascript erroring out. Load up the console in your app on Heroku. Does basic Javascript work? If not, something could be eating your errors–I’ve seen this happen before but I haven’t been able to find what exactly causes it.

• Is there actually an issue with Slidedeck loading? If it’s wrapped in a class (like how jQuery is wrapped in the jQuery class), can you reference that class in the console?

• Relative paths should be fine on Heroku…but I notice in this line:

  //= require_tree ../themes/halo/javascripts

  you’re requiring the equivalent of app/assets/themes/halo/javascripts. Is that right? Why not use the javascripts folder? If you have css, and images in this folder as well, you can split them into their respective app/assets/ subfolders, just to be sure. (My teammates have told me that this isn’t or shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ve found it to help me in one or two instances).

• Were there any console errors pushing to Heroku related to asset precompile failure? They have a dedicated page for that error.