Rails asset caching -- cannot get max-age to set

Question

I'm having trouble getting rails to set the max-age value for any of my CSS or JS assets. We're running rails 3.1, but we upgraded so I am quite possibly missing some obvious piece of configurations. At this point, I've flipped most of the configs I can find from true to false and back again with no luck.

Here is my current environment/production.rb

Ventura::Application.configure do
  # Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/application.rb

  # Code is not reloaded between requests
  config.cache_classes = true

  # Full error reports are disabled and caching is turned on
  config.consider_all_requests_local       = false
  config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

  # Configure static asset server for tests with Cache-Control for performance
  config.serve_static_assets = false
  config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=3600"

  # Compress JavaScripts and CSS
  config.assets.compress = true

  # Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed
  config.assets.compile = true

  # Generate digests for assets URLs
  config.assets.digest = true

  # Defaults to Rails.root.join("public/assets")
  # config.assets.manifest = YOUR_PATH

  # Specifies the header that your server uses for sending files                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
  # config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile" # for apache
  # config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = 'X-Accel-Redirect' # for nginx

  # Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport-Security, and use secure cookies.
  # config.force_ssl = true

  # See everything in the log (default is :info)
  # config.log_level = :debug

  # Use a different logger for distributed setups
  # config.logger = SyslogLogger.new

  # Use a different cache store in production
  # config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store

  # Enable serving of images, stylesheets, and JavaScripts from an asset server
  # config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://assets.example.com"

  # Precompile additional assets (application.js, application.css, and all non-JS/CSS are already added)
  # config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )

  # Disable delivery errors, bad email addresses will be ignored
  # config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

  # Default mailer URL
  config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'http://ventura-production.herokuapp.com/'}

  # Enable threaded mode
  # config.threadsafe!

  # Enable locale fallbacks for I18n (makes lookups for any locale fall back to
  # the I18n.default_locale when a translation can not be found)
  config.i18n.fallbacks = true

  # Send deprecation notices to registered listeners
  config.active_support.deprecation = :notify
end

And this is in my application.rb

# Enable the asset pipeline
config.assets.enabled = true

# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets
config.assets.version = '1.0'

# Don't load resources when precompiling
config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

I am including the assets correctly, I think. Here's an example: <%= javascript_include_tag "client/jquery", "client/jquery-ui-1_8_18", "client/bootstrap_min", "client/jquery-select-menu", "client/jquery_tablesorter", "client/jquery_tablesorter_pager", "client/application" %>

And a partial trace on a request of any given page:

cache: [GET /assets/client/jquery-ui-1_8_18-d903da4c219079ca31f0ea1b23f89afc.css] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/bootstrap-2186f501bbd967564f2793c1c30aebc8.css] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/rg-5f04e577cfffd5dbcb8a1735ad211bd9.css] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/custom_charts-63eaad73c206c7ce6616c7f718be783f.css] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/bootstrap_min-afbee53fdd364c866cbd15abd6473012.js] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/jquery-select-menu-f2a3776430c5b4ead15173d0247f3f11.js] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/jquery_tablesorter-7fc613e34c891c852e2932f59bf91368.js] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/jquery_tablesorter_pager-141a886e7f35eb9f662b865516b23eca.js] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/jquery-689ca6a49fcbd1c3777b13d1abcc1316.js] fresh
cache: [GET /assets/client/application-6a61f272dd6a1ff7b5587435e67cd1bf.js] fresh

I should be able to avoid all these gets on every page-load. (and yes, I should not host most jquery stuff locally, on my to-do list)

Answer 1

From the Rails Configuration Guide (emphasis mine):

config.serve_static_assets configures Rails itself to serve static assets. Defaults to true, but in the production environment is turned off as the server software (e.g. Nginx or Apache) used to run the application should serve static assets instead. Unlike the default setting set this to true when running (absolutely not recommended!) or testing your app in production mode using WEBrick. Otherwise you won´t be able use page caching and requests for files that exist regularly under the public directory will anyway hit your Rails app.

I would try setting config.serve_static_assets = true if you haven't already.

Update: The Heroku Dev Center also recommends this:

To allow your application to properly serve, invalidate and refresh static assets several config settings must be updated in config/environments/production.rb. Allow Rails to serve assets with the serve_static_assets setting.