We have common CSS styling in our organisation that most of the projects use. These assets (css, images etc) are included in every project’s source code.
I would like to have a gem that could host these assets and the projects that use this gem would be able to directly use them. At the moment, I can only find ways to use generators and ‘install’ the assets into a project, not to use them from the gem itself.
The main requirement is that if there’s a bug fix/ improvement made to the assets, just updating the gem should get me the latest in all projects that use the upgraded gem.
how do I go about doing this?
You can do this quite easily in rails 3.1+ if you make your gem a rails engine. Among other things if you add assets to an engine then you can require those CSS files from your application’s manifest files etc.
There’s a walk through on how to do this here and quite a few gems out there that wrap js/CSS packages with that exact aim of being able to upgrade the assets used without having to run generators or anything. For example the jquery-rails gem does this for jquery. A more complicated example is jquery-ui-rails, which bundles all the jquery ui js,CSS, images etc and lets you load only the jquery ui components you actually need.