What sprockets mean in rails

Question

So, I just realised that I have absolutely no Idea what Sprockets are in rails.

when using either bootstrap, or materialize, it is requested to include the sprocket (bootstrap-sprocket or materialize-sprocket) in the application.js file.

Everything I search talks about the asset pipeline and confuses me the more.

According to ruby-guides,

The asset pipeline is technically no longer a core feature of Rails 4, it has been extracted out of the framework into the sprockets-rails gem.

and when I did bundle show sprockets-rails, I got:

/Users/Sunday/workspace/resilience/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/gems/sprockets-rails-2.3.1 

which shows that I have the gem, at least.

But my confusion and my question is that what is the importance of sprockets, as opposed to sprockets-rails that made other gems like bootstrap and materialize and probably some others to have sprockets, especially in their javascript files?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Sprockets is a Ruby library for compiling and serving web assets. Sprockets allows to organize an application’s JavaScript files into smaller more manageable chunks that can be distributed over a number of directories and files. It provides structure and practices on how to include assets in our projects.

Using directives at the start of each JavaScript file, Sprockets can determine which files a JavaScript file depends on. When it comes to deploying your application, Sprockets then uses these directives to turn your multiple JavaScript files into a single file for better performance.