Rails assets don't get updated

Question

I have a Rails 3.1 app and for some reason when I change CSS, the changes don't show up. I did bundle exec rake assets:precompile and it helped once, but now I am stuck with the old CSS no matter what.

Answer 1

In case any future Googlers find this thread: I had the same problem in the test environment of a Rails 4.2.8 application. None of the above solutions worked. Setting config.serve_static_files = false in config/environments/test.rb solved it.

Bear in mind that this is a temporary fix as it causes all files in the public folder to no longer be served (including 404.html, favicon.ico, robots.txt, etc).

Answer 2

As your assets are now precompiled you need to clean them with the following

bundle exec RAILS_ENV=development rake rails_group=assets assets:clean

Answer 3

For my production environment I had to combine a few of the above steps to get my assets recompiled.

First I had to do:

rake assets:clean

Making sure I was in the right environment

Then I needed to delete the public/assets directory that the precompile creates (or just the file that you need to fix, application-<hash>.css for example)

Then finally re-run

rake assets:precompile

And restart my apache server (I use passenger with apache, not tested with nginx)