Rails 3.1 Deploy to Production (with Apache & Passenger) Asset Problems

Question

Rails 3.1 has changed the way it handles the asset pipeline and it is causing issues when deploying to production.

I am using Apache and Passenger, which seem to work fine.

My production is setup like this (for now).

# congif/environments/production.rb
config.cache_classes = false
config.consider_all_requests_local       = true
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
config.serve_static_assets = false
config.assets.compress = true
config.assets.compile = false
config.assets.digest = true
config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile" # for apache

I run rake assets:precompile on Ubuntu and start server. And... nothing. None of my images load.

The legendary 'I can't find an image at this URL' box.

I run rake assets:precompile on CentOS and start server. And... permission errors.

*Error Compiling CSS Asset*
Errno::EACCESS: Permission Denied - [app path]/tmp/cache/assets/E95
[path to RVM Ruby]/fileutils.rb:243:in 'mkdir'

I can't get it to budge. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

UPDATE

This solution has worked every time for me:

First Clean out your Assets

rm -rf public/assets

and

rake assets:clean RAILS_ENV=production

Second, in #production.rb change

config.assets.compile = false

to

config.assets.compile = true

Third, run to precompile your assets

rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production

Fourth, in #production.rb change

config.assets.compile = true

back to

config.assets.compile = false

Fifth, restart your server by running:

touch tmp/restart.txt

Sixth, un-restrict permissions on your newly created assets by running this command

chmod -R 777 public/assets

Seventh, celebrate!!

Answer 1

That's a simple permission problem. Give the server/daemon the right to create files in [app_path]/tmp recursively.

Assuming your server process runs with the www-data user you do this with:

cd APP_PATH
chmod -R u+w tmp

and if the directory does not belong to the user you have to change the ownership:

chown -R www-data tmp

Answer 2

Try creating public/assets via sudo or try performing rvmsudo rake assets:precompile - essentially, it's not able to create the directory on your server — hence the error.