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Precompiling Assets
3:12Our app is working, mostly, but its CSS and JavaScript files aren't loading. Our last step will be to fix that.
Our site is working pretty well,
but if we load our browser's
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developer tools, here in the console,
we'll see several errors.
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It's trying to load CSS and JavaScript
files, but it isn't finding them.
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When you're working in development mode,
CSS and
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JavaScript are loaded
through the asset pipeline.
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But because this is production and
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we need speed, Rails isn't configured
to use the asset pipeline here.
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Instead, we're going to need to
precompile all those assets.
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So let's go back to our terminal,
hold the server.
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And we're going to need to run
this command in the production
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environment again, so
we'll do RAILS_ENV=production.
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We'll run the bin/rails executable again.
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And this time, we're going to
run the task, assets:precompile.
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This will look through all your CSS,
SAS, JavaScript, coffee script, etc,
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and compile those files out to
the public assets directory.
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So, hit Enter to run the command.
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And it'll show you a log
with all the files it wrote.
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Now normally in production, static assets
like this would be served by a dedicated
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web server, such as Apache or Engine X,
but we don't have those configured yet, so
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for this test app, we're gonna need to
configure Rails itself to serve them.
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In a later workshop, we'll show you how
to serve those files via your web server.
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To have Rails serve those files,
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we're going to need to set
an environment variable.
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So let's edit our rbenv.vars file again.
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I'm gonna use the nano editor and
edit the .rbenv-vars file.
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Move down to a new line,
and we're going to set
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the RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES
environment variable.
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All caps,
use underscores to separate the words.
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Then type an equal sign, and
we're gonna set the value to true.
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Again, make sure there are no
spaces surrounding the equal sign.
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Control load to write the file out,
and Ctrl+X to exit, and
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that should be all there is to it.
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Let's try running our server again.
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Now let's go back to our browser and
reload the page.
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And the warnings for
CSS and JS files are gone.
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There you have it.
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We've installed Ruby on a production
server, then deployed the Rails app to it.
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If you run into any trouble
following any of these steps or
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have a slightly different environment
than what's shown in the videos,
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be sure to check the teacher's notes for
some tips.
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Most of the configuration you've
set up can just live on the server
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from now on without any changes.
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But there are a few of these steps that
you're going to need to repeat every time
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you release a new version of your app,
such as pulling the changes from Git and
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restarting your web server.
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Doing it manually won't seem too bad at
first, but over time, the potential for
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mistakes adds up.
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So, in an upcoming course,
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we're going to show you how to automate
deploys to make them fast, easy, and safe.
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