Error pushing to heroku - aborting my rake assets:precompile

Question

Edit: I'm a new ruby on rails student.

Following my Git Push Heroku Master, I am running into issues with Heroku. Here is the latest and greatest, aborting the rake assets:precompile.

-----> Preparing app for Rails asset pipeline
   Running: rake assets:precompile
   rake aborted!
   could not connect to server: Connection refused
   Is the server running on host "127.0.0.1" and accepting
   TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
   Tasks: TOP => environment
   (See full trace by running task with --trace)
   Precompiling assets failed, enabling runtime asset compilation
   Injecting rails31_enable_runtime_asset_compilation
   Please see this article for troubleshooting help:
   http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails31_heroku_cedar#troubleshooting

Included below are the contents of my Gemfile:

gem 'rails', '3.2.8'
gem 'bootstrap-sass', '2.1'
gem 'pg'

group :development, :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails'
  gem 'guard-rspec'
  gem 'guard-spork'
  gem 'spork'
  gem 'annotate'
  gem 'database_cleaner'
end

# Gems used only for assets and not required
# in production environments by default.
group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.2.3'
end

platforms :jruby do
  gem 'trinidad'
  gem 'jruby-openssl'
end

gem 'jquery-rails'

# Use unicorn as the web server
# gem 'unicorn'

# Deploy with Capistrano
# gem 'capistrano'

# To use debugger
# gem 'ruby-debug'

# Bundle the extra gems:
gem 'RedCloth', '~> 4.2.9', :require => 'redcloth'
gem 'ruby-openid', :require => 'openid'
gem 'rack-openid', :require => 'rack/openid'
gem 'aaronh-chronic', :require => 'chronic' # Fixes for 1.9.2
gem 'coderay'
gem 'lesstile'
gem 'formtastic'
gem 'will_paginate', '~> 3.0.2'
gem 'exception_notification', '~> 2.5.2'
gem 'open_id_authentication'

# Bundle gems for the local environment. Make sure to
# put test-only gems in this group so their generators
# and rake tasks are available in development mode:
group :test do
  gem 'database_cleaner'
  gem 'cucumber-rails',    :require => false
  gem 'cucumber-websteps', :require => false
  gem 'factory_girl'
  gem 'rspec'
  gem 'nokogiri', '~> 1.5.0'
  gem 'webrat'
end

What might be the issue?

Update: I ran the rake command with --trace, and it had alerted me with a failure because the production database did not exist. I created the database, and ran --trace again, and this is what I'm currently being thrown:

Command failed with status (1): [/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/1.9.3-p286/bin/ruby...]

Answer 1

See the Rails 3.1+ Asset Pipeline on Heroku Cedar article. This exact scenario is covered in the Troubleshooting section.

In short, your Heroku application has a strong separation between building (including asset compilation) and running (where your application becomes available). This is consistent with the 12-factor app principles, but it means that your application cannot access any configured resources during the build phase -- including the database -- meaning ActiveRecord is unavailable during asset precompilation.

You can tell Rails not to bootstrap your application during asset compilation in config/application.rb:

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false 

The troubleshooting section also recommends:

If rake assets:precompile is still not working, you can debug this locally by configuring a nonexistent database in your local config/database.yml and attempting to run rake assets:precompile. Ideally you should be able to run this command without connecting to the database.

Answer 2

I struggled with exactly the same problem, for hours tonight. After adding

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false 

to application.rb, remember to do a

git commit 

right afterwards. I forgot to do this, and Heroku had no idea I'd changed application.rb. They don't have this extra line on their troubleshooting page.

Answer 3

For Rails 4

Enable Heroku Labs feature to fix this problem

heroku labs:enable user-env-compile

Answer 4

I had this issue with Rails 4 and none of the other suggestions helped. I finally figured it out and it was due to the Rollify gem trying to connect to the database. That has been fixed in the Rollify gem, however, you may need to grab the latest source code to get the fix. I just change my gem import for Rollify to:

gem 'rolify', :git => 'git://github.com/EppO/rolify.git'

That seemed to fix the problem and I haven't had to do any of the other suggestions.

Don't forget to bundle install and commit the change to git.

Also, if that doesn't fix your problem either, you might want to start looking closely at the gems you're using and make sure none of them attempt to connect to the database.