A solution to assets management in Rails

https://rails-assets.org/

by lfxx • 12 years ago

62 34 12 years ago

rails-assets.org

joevandyk• 12 years ago

I don't get this.

It's not hard to download a JavaScript or css file and put them in app/assets.

What warrants the additional complexity?

jbverschoor2• 12 years ago

It becomes a huge mess, and you will not remember which file belongs to which project. All css files and images are in the same and you have no clue which version you are using.

Smudge6• 12 years ago

It's not that hard, but do it 50 times, manually managing a complex dependency tree (which jQuery version does this thing need again?), and you'll realize how nice it would be to have a package manager for your client-side dependencies.

jbverschoor2• 12 years ago

TL;DR -> Gem repo which automatically converts Bower packages to gems

Awesome! Was looking for something like this. I used to have a "vendorassets" directory where I could sanely manage 3rd party assets. Still a pain in the ass sometimes.

Rails-gems are usually out of date and everyone seems to jump the bower-ship.

twerquie• 12 years ago

What's wrong with just using Bower?

mcmillion• 12 years ago

I guess the idea would be that you could keep everything in your Gemfile. Personally, I'm fine with just using Bower for the front end pieces.

ef4• 12 years ago

Among other things, Bower lacks the equivalent of Gemfile.lock or npm-shrinkwrap.json.

So you can't get reliably repeatable installs.

gkop3• 12 years ago

Check out http://bower.io/ :

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.

rails-assets is an example of a higher-level, more opinionated stack that adds value on top of bower.

nixme• 12 years ago

You know sprockets includes bower support. Just add the path.

sheerun2• 12 years ago

Rails Assets:

- creates manifest files for each component so you can just "require jquery" instead "require jquery/dist/jquery"

- splits assets in four categories: javascripts, stylesheets, images, fonts, so you can use sprockets helpers without a problem

- replaces relative urls in stylesheets with image-url font-url etc., so assets work out of the box

- converts .css files to .scss so you can get advantage of @import in SASS files

- you get assets locking with Gemfile.lock, so you can be sure each deploy will look the same. It's not possible yet with bower.

And few other sprockets integrations.

Unfortunately it's centralized solution but we're working on that.

Bluestrike2• 12 years ago

That's pretty nifty.

danaw• 12 years ago

Just set bower to install into vendor/assets and link to those instead in your stylesheets/scripts. No need to add an additional layer of indirection and increasing the length of you Gemfile. Your bower.json should be where this information is stored, not you Gemfile.

munificent• 12 years ago

How do you lock your bower dependencies then?

chrisweekly2• 12 years ago

Bower deps are bound by semver; and if you're willing to commit them (which you should, if your project is a webapp and not a software library) then you can lock them w 100% certainty and control. /$.02

ffn• 12 years ago

Oh sweet. Looks like I don't have to put vendor assets code into my git repos anymore. Thanks rails-assets.org

adamtj• 12 years ago

That would tie your ability to deploy your code to the availability of rails-assets.org. How many nines are they promising you and how much are you paying for it?

sheerun2• 12 years ago

You're totally right, we want to decentralize Rails Assets in some way.

On other hand we're pretty close to the uptime of GitHub and we're not going anywhere, so I would't worry too much.

PetrolMan• 12 years ago

This is really neat but my problem with the asset pipeline hasn't been managing library dependencies but the general slowness of the process.

clarkevans• 12 years ago

Is there an equivalent to this in Python land (I've looked but not seen anything)? It'd be great to have "pip install bower-bootstrap".

rhizome31• 12 years ago

Fanstatic is pretty close: http://www.fanstatic.org/

kaonashi• 12 years ago

(the wrong) solution to asset management in Rails

A solution to assets management in Rails

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