Rails 4 - Where do vendor assets go?

Question

After this commit in Rails, it is suggested that 3rd party assets should either be put in the app/assets folder or config.precompile should list all such assets.

Quoting a use case on that thread

For example, if I need to vendor a jQuery plugin which also has CSS, a font face, and an image sprite, I'd add the .js and .css to vendor/assets/javascripts and vendor/assets/stylesheets. I would also vendor the sprites and fonts in vendor/assets/images and vendor/assets/fonts, respectively. Adding the entire vendor/assets path seems overkill, but manually specifying each asset individually seems tedious (though that might be by design).

Adding third party assets inside app/assets will lead to a Rails 2 like problem of a global assets folder.

Am I missing something ? Whats the Rails 4 way of organizing third party assets.

Answer 1

Third parties should be included by hand explicitly. This is because these libraries have many optional parts such as source code, readme files etc. If you need other things such as images or fonts you can add this files in public folder or do this:

config/application.rb

config.assets.precompile += %w(*.png *.jpg *.jpeg *.gif,
"fontawesome-webfont.ttf",
"fontawesome-webfont.eot",
"fontawesome-webfont.svg",
"fontawesome-webfont.woff")

config.assets.precompile << Proc.new do |path|
  if path =~ /\.(css|js)\z/
    full_path = Rails.application.assets.resolve(path).to_path
    app_assets_path = Rails.root.join('app', 'assets').to_path
    if full_path.starts_with? app_assets_path
      puts "including asset: " + full_path
      true
    else
      puts "excluding asset: " + full_path
      false
    end
  else
    false
  end
end

environment/production.rb

config.serve_static_assets = true

Then run bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production.