I found this really helpful. I'm a little surprised at the inconsistency of the asset pipeline deployment though. I guess we're all supposed to use erb templates if we intend to use it and include images in our stylesheets?

It strikes me as really strange that they would allow certain functionality which you would get used to in development (images in stylesheets that are automatically matched to assets), then have that completely break when you precompile for production.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you avoid compiling in production if you package everything as part of your CI build? Rather than deploy off of a git clone, you compile at the end of CI, vendorize your gems, generate a tarball, and push that up.

This minimizes production dependencies (including the need to compile gems live) as long as your CI environment sufficiently resembles prod.

That could be one solution, however there are some problems that spring to mind like deploying to different architectures (common if you're using EC2) - I guess this fits your point about your CI env resembling prod.

I couldn't post this in the Facebook comments on the post, but you can fix the Rake 0.9.0 error by putting the following right before load_tasks in your Rakefile:

    module ::MyAppName
      class Application
        include Rake::DSL
      end
    end

    module ::RakeFileUtils
      extend Rake::FileUtilsExt
    end

There's a fix on the way, too.

Also, I believe if you're using SASS/SCSS you can interpolate the asset like so, without having to use erb:

    background: #00ff00 url(#{asset_path 'rails.png'}) no-repeat fixed center;

Half my rake tasks in production will NOT work with this hack in place. I amended my similar comment.[1]

Rake 0.9.0 is extremely broken. I recommend reverting to 0.8.7.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2572790

Thanks for the info, I'll update the post shortly. Out of interest, what was wrong with the FB comments? I only started using it yesterday because disqus doesn't have a HTTPS option (that I could find anyway).

Oh, it seems to trip out on double colons. If I wasn't being lazy I would have just posted a gist.

I just tried the SCSS trick but the generated CSS was:

    background: lime url(asset_path "rails.png") no-repeat fixed center;

Ah, yeah I forgot, that syntax is used for SassScript. I guess erb is the way to go then.

Thanks for the sass inline tip..dont know why i didnt think of that

also -- the DSL trick doesnt seem to work on heroku (?)..ive had to force 0.8.7 there

It would be fantastic if someone would release a capistrano/rails plugin that lets you specify when to build the assets and where to send them, for those of us who have static assets on different servers from production Rails apps.

Why can't someone = you?