rails 3.1.3: trying to run locally in production, asset pipeline not working

Question

My app runs fine in development mode.

When I run in production mode using RAILS_ENV=production rails s none of my .css or .js files get loaded. (I did precompile assets, using RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile.)

The webrick log shows:

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets/application-a73ce43be7bf75953cd0c60b2b4a7eb0.js"):

and

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets/application-986dd79830088c416c1632c12999ec69.css"):

The files were compiled (according to the log\production.log file) and my public/assets directory does show those files with and without the fingerprint:

ls public/assets application-986dd79830088c416c1632c12999ec69.css application-986dd79830088c416c1632c12999ec69.css.gz application-a73ce43be7bf75953cd0c60b2b4a7eb0.js application-a73ce43be7bf75953cd0c60b2b4a7eb0.js.gz application.css application.css.gz application.js application.js.gz 

Answer 1

Rails doesn't serve static assets in production mode by default. If you want to disable this and serve the static assets, update your config/environments/production.rb file with this:

config.serve_static_assets = true 

The reasoning behind Rails' default configuration is that it assumes you'll be running behind a standard web server in production mode (Apache, Nginx, etc.) which will then proxy the requests to your Rails app. Since the assets are precompiled, Apache/Nginx/etc. can directly serve them without needing to talk to your Rails processes.