Rails 4: assets not loading in production

Question

I'm trying to put my app into production and image and css asset paths aren't working.

Here's what I'm currently doing:

• Image assets live in /app/assets/images/image.jpg
• Stylesheets live in /app/assets/stylesheets/style.css
• In my layout, I reference the css file like this: <%= stylesheet_link_tag "styles", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
• Before restarting unicorn, I run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile and it succeeds and I see the fingerprinted files in the public/assets directory.

When I browse to my site, I get a 404 not found error for mysite.com/stylesheets/styles.css.

What am I doing wrong?

Update: In my layout, it looks like this:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag    "bootstrap.min", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag    "styles", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "application", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>

The generate source is this:

<link data-turbolinks-track="true" href="/stylesheets/bootstrap.min.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" />
<link data-turbolinks-track="true" href="/stylesheets/styles.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" />
<script data-turbolinks-track="true" src="/assets/application-0c647c942c6eff10ad92f1f2b0c64efe.js"></script>

Looks like Rails is not properly looking for the compiled css files. But it's very confusing why it's working correctly for javascripts (notice the /assets/****.js path).

Answer 1

In rails 4 you need to make the changes below:

config.assets.compile = true
config.assets.precompile =  ['*.js', '*.css', '*.css.erb'] 

This works with me. use following command to pre-compile assets

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Best of luck!

Answer 2

I just had the same problem and found this setting in config/environments/production.rb:

# Rails 4:
config.serve_static_assets = false

# Or for Rails 5:
config.public_file_server.enabled = false

Changing it to true got it working. It seems by default Rails expects you to have configured your front-end webserver to handle requests for files out of the public folder instead of proxying them to the Rails app. Perhaps you've done this for your javascript files but not your CSS stylesheets?

(See Rails 5 documentation). As noted in comments, with Rails 5 you may just set the RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES environment variable, since the default setting is config.public_file_server.enabled = ENV['RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES'].present?.

Answer 3

In /config/environments/production.rb I had to add this:

Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += %w( *.js ^[^_]*.css *.css.erb )

The .js was getting precompiled already, but I added it anyway. The .css and .css.erb apparently don't happen automatically. The ^[^_] excludes partials from being compiled -- it's a regexp.

It's a little frustrating that the docs clearly state that asset pipeline IS enabled by default but doesn't clarify the fact that only applies to javascripts.

Answer 4

I was able to solve this problem by changing: config.assets.compile = false to
config.assets.compile = true in /config/environments/production.rb

Update (June 24, 2018): This method creates a security vulnerability if the version of Sprockets you're using is less than 2.12.5, 3.7.2, or 4.0.0.beta8

Answer 5

For Rails 5, you should enable the follow config code:

config.public_file_server.enabled = true

By default, Rails 5 ships with this line of config:

config.public_file_server.enabled = ENV['RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES'].present?

Hence, you will need to set the environment variable RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES to true.

Answer 6

There are 2 things you must accomplish to serve the assets in production:

1. Precompile the assets.
2. Serve the assets on the server to browser.

1) In order to precompile the assets, you have several choices.

• You can run rake assets:precompile on your local machine, commit it to source code control (git), then run the deployment program, for example capistrano. This is not a good way to commit precompiled assets to SCM.

• You can write a rake task that run RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile on the target servers each time you deploy your Rails app to production, before you restart the server.

Code in a task for capistrano will look similar to this:

on roles(:app) do
  if DEPLOY_ENV == 'production'
    execute("cd #{DEPLOY_TO_DIR}/current && RAILS_ENV=production rvm #{ruby_string} do rake assets:precompile")
  end
end

2) Now, you have the assets on production servers, you need to serve them to browser.

Again, you have several choices.

• Turn on Rails static file serving in config/environments/production.rb

  config.serve_static_assets = true # old
  
  or
  
  config.serve_static_files = true # new
  

  Using Rails to serve static files will kill your Rails app performance.

• Configure nginx (or Apache) to serve static files.

  For example, my nginx that was configured to work with Puma looks like this:

  location ~ ^/(assets|images|fonts)/(.*)$ {
      alias /var/www/foster_care/current/public/$1/$2;
      gzip on;
      expires max;
      add_header Cache-Control public;
  }
  

Answer 7

Rails 4 no longer generates the non fingerprinted version of the asset: stylesheets/style.css will not be generated for you.

If you use stylesheet_link_tag then the correct link to your stylesheet will be generated

In addition styles.css should be in config.assets.precompile which is the list of things that are precompiled

Answer 8

change your Production.rb file line

config.assets.compile = false

into

config.assets.compile = true

and also add

config.assets.precompile =  ['*.js', '*.css', '*.css.erb']

Answer 9

What you SHOULD NOT do:

Some of my colleagues above have recommended you to do this:

config.serve_static_assets = true  ## DON”T DO THIS!! 
config.public_file_server.enabled = true ## DON”T DO THIS!!

The rails asset pipeline says of the above approach:

This mode uses more memory, performs more poorly than the default and is not recommended. See here: (http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#live-compilation)

What you SHOULD do:

Precompile your assets.

RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile

You can probably do that with a rake task.

Answer 10

I'm running Ubuntu Server 14.04, Ruby 2.2.1 and Rails 4.2.4 I have followed a deploy turorial from DigitalOcean and everything went well but when I go to the browser and enter the IP address of my VPS my app is loaded but without styles and javascript.

The app is running with Unicorn and Nginx. To fix this problem I entered my server using SSH with my user 'deployer' and go to my app path which is '/home/deployer/apps/blog' and run the following command:

RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake assets:precompile

Then I just restart the VPS and that's it! It works for me!

Hope it could be useful for somebody else!

Answer 11

If precompile is set you DO NOT need

config.assets.compile = true

as this is to serve assets live.

Our problem was we only had development secret key base set in config/secrets.yml

development:
    secret_key_base: '83d141eeb181032f4070ae7b1b27d9ff'

Need entry for production environment

Answer 12

The default matcher for compiling files includes application.js, application.css and all non-JS/CSS files (this will include all image assets automatically) from app/assets folders including your gems:

If you have other manifests or individual stylesheets and JavaScript files to include, you can add them to the precompile array in config/initializers/assets.rb:

Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += ['admin.js', 'admin.css', 'swfObject.js']

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#precompiling-assets

Answer 13

First of all check your assets, it might be possible there is some error in pre-compiling of assets.

To pre-compile assets in production ENV run this command:

RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile

If it shows error, remove that first,

In case of "undefined variable" error, load that variable file before using it in another file.

example:

@import "variables";
@import "style";

in application.rb file set sequence of pre-compiliation of assets

example:

config.assets.precompile += [ 'application.js', 'admin.js', 'admin/events.js', 'admin/gallery.js', 'frontendgallery.js']

config.assets.precompile += [ 'application.css', 'admin.css','admin/events.css', 'admin/gallery.css', 'frontendgallery.css']

Answer 14

Found this:

The configuration option config.serve_static_assets has been renamed to config.serve_static_files to clarify its role.

in config/environments/production.rb:

# Disable serving static files from the `/public` folder by default since
# Apache or NGINX already handles this.
config.serve_static_files = ENV['RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES'].present?

So set env RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES or using Nginx to serving static files. Add config.serve_static_assets = true will still work, but removed in future.

Answer 15

it is not recommended to let capistrano do assets precompile, because it may take ages and often time out. try to do local assets precompile.

1st, set in config/application.rb config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false then do local RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake assets:precompile and add those public/assets to git.

and config/environments/development.rb, change your asset path to avoid using precompiled assets:

config.assets.prefix = '/dev-assets'

If you have db connection issue, means u have initializer that uses db. one way around it is to set a new environment by duplicate production.rb as maybe production2.rb, and in database.yml, add production2 environment with development db setting. then do

RAILS_ENV=production2 bin/rake assets:precompile

if you are still facing some issue with assets, for example ckeditor, add the js file into config/initializers/assets.rb

Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += %w( ckeditor.js )

Answer 16

I may be wrong but those who recommend changing

config.assets.compile = true

The comment on this line reads: #Do not fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed.

This suggests that by setting this to true you are not fixing the problem but rather bypassing it and running the pipeline every time. This must surely kill your performance and defeat the purpose of the pipeline?

I had this same error and it was due to the application running in a sub folder that rails didn't know about.

So my css file where in home/subfolder/app/public/.... but rails was looking in home/app/public/...

try either moving your app out of the subfolder or telling rails that it is in a subfolder.

Answer 17

location ~ ^/assets/ {
  expires 1y;
  add_header Cache-Control public;
  add_header ETag "";
}

This fixed the problem for me in production. Put it into the nginx config.

Answer 18

Even we faced the same problem where RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile succeeded but things did not work as expected.
We found that unicorn was the main culprit here.

Same as your case, even we used to restart unicorn after compiling the assets. It was noticed that when unicorn is restarted, only its worker processes are restarted and not the master process.
This is the main reason the correct assets are not served.

Later, after compiling assets, we stopped and started unicorn so that the unicorn master process is also restarted and the correct assets were getting served.
Stopping and starting unicorn brings around 10 secs on downtime when compared to restarting the unicorn. This is the workaround that can be used where as long term solution is move to puma from unicorn.