Pre-generating cached Stylesheets and Javascripts with Rails 2.0

December 21, 2007 by alex

We just switched autoki over to Rails 2.0.2 in the last days. While the transition we replaced the asset_packager plugin with the new Rails 2.0 :cache => true option in stylesheet_link_tag/javascript_include_tag.

As our assets (public/*) are served from an apache webserver that has its own checkout of the project, we can’t let Rails generate the all.css/all.js files on the fly when the first request comes in. Instead we have to pre-generate them at deployment. For asset_packager we had a capistrano task that did just that. Rails doesn’t have that. Instead the logic to generate the files is built right into the link/include methods in the AssetTagHelper(!). So now we are simply doing this in our capistrano recipe:

desc "generate combined css and javascript files on web"
after 'deploy:symlink', :roles => [:web] do
  run "cd #{release_path} && mongrel_rails start -d -e production -p 3001 && curl http://localhost:3001 > /dev/null"
  run "cd #{release_path} && mongrel_rails stop"
end

Fire up a mongrel, curl the start page, bring it back down. Feels a bit overkill but it works. (at least I hope it will when I’ll first try it later today)

This entry was posted on December 21, 2007 by alex.