Question

I want opinion and views from community.

I am developing a large application with multiple modules, Its a content based website which need many unique UI features as well.

I love to use SASS and coffee-script, but the reason i want your opinion is that, we need to compile the assets and on my Core-i3 machine it takes 15-20 minutes. Since we are using bootstrap, and compass-rails as well.

My point of question is, Is it right to use Asset pipeline where we have to deal with huge CSS and where we have constant update in the UI/CSS. Since for each css change we go for live, we have to compile the assets and takes a very long time.

Is it no feasible that we use normal Rails 3 styling and scripting features to avoid complexity of asset-pipeline for such a huge project. Or what would be the ways that we can reduce the complexity of it and reduce that compiling time.

Please provide your opinions in detail, so that this question/answers server as a guideline for other people before deciding on assets pipeline.

Answer 1

I see that you have three options:

1. Disable the asset pipeline completely

This approach might be the easiest to take configuration-wise: you could disable the asset pipeline and fall back to continue developing directly in CSS + Javascript. Personally, I see Coffeescript and SCSS as huge productivy gains, that make my life easier, so I would not take this route. But it’s a possibility.

To disable the asset pipeline you need to set the following config option:

#application.rb
config.assets.enabled = false

And remove the gems in the assets group from your gemfile:

group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.2.3'
  gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.1'
  gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

2. Enable the asset pipeline in production

Usually not recommended but also an option: depending on your server load and amount of users, it might be possible to run an application in production with the asset pipeline enabled. The downside of this approach is of course that the server must recompile the assets everytime a request comes in.

3. Get a faster machine (with an SSD if possible)

A computer is really really cheap compared with the amount of money a developer’s time costs, so if possible I would recommend to get a better machine with a solid state disk. Not only you will save time, but IO intensive operations like running test suites or compiling assets are drastically reduced when going SSD.