Slight Asset Pipeline Overview

The Rails Asset Pipeline can be slightly tricky to newcomers and those not in the rails world. It was brought into this world when version 3.1 launched and its main mission was to ease the developer pain on getting assets (images, scripts, stylesheets) production ready.

There are a lot of minor gotchas with the pipeline like:

  • Remembering to actually use the helper methods to get things properly fingerprinted
  • Remembering to add custom named manifest files to config/application.rb
#config/application.rb
config.assets.precompile += ['new_manifest.js', 'new_manifest.css']
  • Remembering to include newly created javascripts and stylesheets to our manifests.
  • And I am sure there is much more that I am forgetting.

Our Code and The Pipeline

Our codebase is a multi-tenant platform that services our top three sites: Cook’s Illustrated, Cook’s Country, and America’s Test Kitchen. We have approximately six-ish custom manifest files due to the multi-tenant nature of our platform. At times, we do tend to forget to use one of the many helpers that Rails comes with.

Quick Presentation For Knowledge Flow

In lieu of this lack of remembering to use helpers, I decided to create a quick presentation (5-10minute talk in length) to go over the asset pipeline, less in depth than Rails documentation. I used cleaver to generate the presentation. Comments and questions are welcomed.