In a previous post I wrote about how we wanted to pregenerate our packed assets simply by firing up a mongrel on deployemnt and request a page so it would generate the assets by calling the stylesheet_link_tag ... :cache => true and javascript_include_tag ... :cache => true methods in our application.rhtml.

It turned out starting and stopping a mongrel during development wasn’t really a good idea. We ran into all sorts of problems with deployemnts not shutting down the mongrel or not deleting its pid file which made the next deployemnt fails and stuff like that. Plus, to be honest, this really felt like a hack from the beginning.

So what we ended up doing was this: Write a small class that calls the methods to generate the all.js/all.css files and simply call that from our capistrano script. This is how it looks (config/assets.rb):
(more…)

We just switched autoki over to Rails 2.0.2 in the last days. While the transition we replaced the asset_packager plugin with the new Rails 2.0 :cache => true option in stylesheet_link_tag/javascript_include_tag.

As our assets (public/*) are served from an apache webserver that has its own checkout of the project, we can’t let Rails generate the all.css/all.js files on the fly when the first request comes in. Instead we have to pre-generate them at deployment. For asset_packager we had a capistrano task that did just that. Rails doesn’t have that. Instead the logic to generate the files is built right into the link/include methods in the AssetTagHelper(!). So now we are simply doing this in our capistrano recipe:

Fire up a mongrel, curl the start page, bring it back down. Feels a bit overkill but it works. (at least I hope it will when I’ll first try it later today)