Rails 4 + Turbolinks: JS in the head or at the bottom of the body?

Question

I'm used to sticking my JS at the bottom of my body element (as per HTML5Boilerplate), but since TurboLinks, which will be on by default in Rails 4, reloads the body (and title) on every request, would it make sense to put my JS in the head from now on? Are there any decent guides or best practices on this yet?

Answer 1

If you're using Turbolinks 5, you can now put turbolinks at the bottom of your body (and follow web dev best practices for rendering a page). This also helps with SEO ever so slightly. Simply add your scripts to the bottom of your body and add

data-turbolinks-eval="false"

to your script tag. This will prevent turbolinks from evaluating after the initial page load. Here's how it is done with the javascript_include_tag:

<%= javascript_include_tag 'application', 'data-turbolinks-eval' => 'false'%>

Then just use

$(document).on('turbolinks:load', function() { // code to be executed when use changes pages });