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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T12:59:20+00:00

I’m running a rails 3.1 app on Heroku Cedar stack which supports the asset

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I’m running a rails 3.1 app on Heroku Cedar stack which supports the asset pipeline. Heroku lists 3 ways to compile assets

  1. Compiling assets locally.
  2. Compiling assets during slug compilation.
  3. Compile assets during runtime.

Obviously #3 is bad for performance and Heroku docs also recommend against it. But I’m not sure which is better between #1 and #2.

#1 requires that you run rake assets:precompile and include your public/assets folder in git. Your slug will be bigger but I assume the downtime for deploying a site will be lower. But bigger slug size means slower app startup so maybe it’s a wash.

#2 will make it take longer to deploy updates because of precompile being done on Heroku side. However, you will have a smaller slug and there’s less to manage/remember.

My question is – which option (#1 or #2) is the best for production and why?

So far it looks like option #2 but I want to make sure I’m not overlooking something.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I addressed some of these issues and a big gotcha in my question here: Rails 3.1.1 asset pipeline Heroku caching gotcha

    I’d prefer #2 if it worked for me so I don’t have to checkin compiled assets which just bloats the git repository.

    Compiling assets during slug compilation won’t result in any additional downtime because your existing app will stay up until slug compilation is complete so no worries there.

    My advice would be #2 if you can make it work for you. If you do end up going w/ #1 then take best practice would be to git rm -r public/assets before rake assets:precompile to make sure no cruft remains.

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