Precompiling Rails Assets for Development

First off: I love Rails’ asset pipeline from the bottom of my heart. It’s a great thing and makes frontend development such a lovely task. There are two little drawbacks though when using it in development: It slows down page reloads and clutters up the log output. Here I’ll show you how to get rid of that.

When you are mainly doing backend development or most of your apps frontend code doesn’t change too much do yourself a favor and precompile your assets for the development environment:

$ RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec rake assets:precompile

This really speeds up page reloads as Rails does not need to look up and precompile the asset files every time a request hits the app anymore.

Another change you might want to make is to set config.assets.debug to false in your development environment. This makes Sprocket concatenate all your files (users.css, search.css, …) into one javascript and stylesheet file (application.css):

config.assets.debug = false

This also cleans up the noisy logging info concerning the asset files that were previously loaded one by one.

When you need to precompile additional assets that aren’t already referenced in you application.js or application.css you’ll want to move the config.assets.precompiledirective from production.rb to application.rb:

config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )

This isn’t directly related but while you are at speeding up our development experience you might also want to have a look at the rails-dev-tweaks gem. This gem defines rules for managing what files get reloaded on page requests in development.