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):
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