ruby on rails - How to avoid precompiled assets being served in development mode?

Question

I prefer not to concatenate JavaScript files in development mode, but serve them as individual files. So I configured:

development.rb:

config.assets.compress = false
config.assets.debug = true
config.assets.compile = true

In my /app/assets/javascript directory I have:

• reviews.js
• reviews/
  • foo.js
  • bar.js

reviews.js:

//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree ./reviews

I include the JavaScript using <%= javascript_include_tag "reviews" %> in my layout. The generated page correctly references the three scripts individually and reviews.js is essentially empty. So far so good.

Now when I precompile my assets for production using rake assets:precompile the three JavaScript files are concatenated into reviews.js. This is all fine for production but now, in development mode, the concatenated reviews.js is served in addition to the two individual files.

Of course, this leads to all kinds of nasty bugs when developing because now, the content of foo.js and bar.js is served twice, one of them in a potentially older version in reviews.js.

How can I make sure Rails doesn't use the precompiled assets in development mode?

Answer 1

In config/environments/development.rb set:

config.assets.prefix = "/assets_dev"

so that in development mode Rails will look there (but it will not find anything, as you will not compile assets in development (this is indeed what you are trying to do -- not compile assets)).

When precompiling for production, use

RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile

so it compiles into the default assets folder, public/assets.