Using jQuery plugins in Rails 3

Question

Having finished Hartl's great Rails Tutorial I'm now working my way through the very good jQuery - Novice to Ninja by Castledine and Sharkie. While I've able to include jquery.js and jquery-ui.js in my rails projects, I'm getting stuck when it comes to adding other jQuery plugins.

I've figured out that when the plugins are hosted on github, I can import them into my project using the command line and:

[my rails app]$ rails install [github URL]

The plugin gets successfully imported into the /vendor/plugin/ directory where javascript_include_tag can't find them. This situation prompts 3 questions:

1. Is there a way to import jQuery plugins into my Rails app that puts them into the public/javascripts/ directory where they belong?

2. If the answer to 1 is "no," is there a way to have javascript_include_tag search for scripts in vendor/plugins/? This seems like bad practice since jQuery scripts are hidden away from the public/javascript/ directory where people would normally look for them.

3. If 1 and 2 are both "no's," is there a more elegant way to move the files from vendor/plugins/ than $mv or copying and pasting?

Note: Through web searching I've come across 37signals' sprokets gem at http://getsprockets.org/ which seems like it might be useful at some point but beyond my current needs and understanding.

Grateful for any thoughts!

Answer 1

In current rails version the directory would be

/vendor/assets/javascripts