Question

We now are developing one Rails project and we have binary files served by our system. So we decided (well, not we but my senior team-mate, actually) to store those files within the /app/assets/binaries (let’s call it so) folder.

For some reasons our administrator get fired and I started administrating the half of our server by my own. And what I found out was something interesting: while starting the server and precompiling the assets, some very large amount of operations took place. And our hard-drive free space began to decrease incredibly fast (because of Capistrano deploys frequently too, of course).

So, what i am asking is: how Rails assets precompilation works? Does it serves all files within the /app/assets/ directory or does it serves only those which are “understandable” by Rails?

My theory is: rake assets:precompile handles our binary files and makes some kind of copy of those files. Am i wrong or am i right?

Answer 1

I believe the precompiler act only on the manifest files. So if you don’t have a manifest that tells to precompile some other folder/file, it won’t work.
Take a look at this part of the tutorial.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#precompiling-assets