Question

Precompiling assets on the production server is very slow. So I have decided to recompile them on the development machine and upload assets to the Amazon S3 by jammit. Everything’s done but I have some negative problems:

1. I have to include public/assets directory to git control. Because if public/assets directory is empty on the production server fails
2. If I precompile assets on the development machine application.js includes in the HTML as compressed and that way I have duplicated js code. Changing js doesn’t make any effect because precompiled application.js interrupts this code.

That way my development process includes following steps:

1. Remove precompiled assets if I’m going to change js or css
2. Do some changes
3. Precompile assets
4. Upload assets to S3 by jammit-s3
5. Do commit and push my changes including assets to the git server
6. Deploy by capistrano

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to configure development environment don’t include compressed application.js if I have it in public/assets directory?
2. Is it possible to configure production environment to work with empty public/assets directory? Assets will only be on the S3 server.

Answer 1

I resolved this problem by including assets dir in gitignore and exclude only one file – public/assets/manifest.yml and production server works correctly now, i.e. config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://assets.example.com" works. It requires only manifest.yml file