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Rails 4 automatically adds the sass-rails, coffee-rails and uglifier gems to your Gemfile

reduce the number of requests that a browser makes to render a web page

Starting with version 3.1, Rails defaults to concatenating all JavaScript files into one master .js file and all CSS files into one master .css file

In production, Rails inserts an MD5 fingerprint into each filename so that the file is cached by the web browser

The technique sprockets uses for fingerprinting is to insert a hash of the content into the name, usually at the end.

asset minification or compression

The sass-rails gem is automatically used for CSS compression if included in Gemfile and no config.assets.css_compressor option is set.

Supported languages include Sass for CSS, CoffeeScript for JavaScript, and ERB for both by default.

When a filename is unique and based on its content, HTTP headers can be set to encourage caches everywhere (whether at CDNs, at ISPs, in networking equipment, or in web browsers) to keep their own copy of the content

asset pipeline is technically no longer a core feature of Rails 4

Rails uses for fingerprinting is to insert a hash of the content into the name, usually at the end

Fingerprinting is enabled by default for production and disabled for all other environments

The files in app/assets are never served directly in production.

Paths are traversed in the order that they occur in the search path

You should use app/assets for files that must undergo some pre-processing before they are served.

By default .coffee and .scss files will not be precompiled on their own

app/assets is for assets that are owned by the application, such as custom images, JavaScript files or stylesheets.

lib/assets is for your own libraries' code that doesn't really fit into the scope of the application or those libraries which are shared across applications.

vendor/assets is for assets that are owned by outside entities, such as code for JavaScript plugins and CSS frameworks.

Any path under assets/* will be searched

By default these files will be ready to use by your application immediately using the require_tree directive.

Sprockets uses files named index (with the relevant extensions) for a special purpose

Rails.application.config.assets.paths

causes turbolinks to check if an asset has been updated and if so loads it into the page

if you add an erb extension to a CSS asset (for example, application.css.erb), then helpers like asset_path are available in your CSS rules

If you add an erb extension to a JavaScript asset, making it something such as application.js.erb, then you can use the asset_path helper in your JavaScript code

The asset pipeline automatically evaluates ERB

data URI — a method of embedding the image data directly into the CSS file — you can use the asset_data_uri helper.

Sprockets will also look through the paths specified in config.assets.paths, which includes the standard application paths and any paths added by Rails engines.

image_tag

asset_data_uri

sass-rails provides -url and -path helpers (hyphenated in Sass, underscored in Ruby) for the following asset classes: image, font, video, audio, JavaScript and stylesheet.

Rails.application.config.assets.compress

In JavaScript files, the directives begin with //=

The require_tree directive tells Sprockets to recursively include all JavaScript files in the specified directory into the output.

manifest files contain directives — instructions that tell Sprockets which files to require in order to build a single CSS or JavaScript file.

Sprockets uses manifest files to determine which assets to include and serve.

the family of require directives prevents files from being included twice in the output

which files to require in order to build a single CSS or JavaScript file

Directives are processed top to bottom, but the order in which files are included by require_tree is unspecified.

In JavaScript files, Sprockets directives begin with //=

If require_self is called more than once, only the last call is respected.

require directive is used to tell Sprockets the files you wish to require.

You need not supply the extensions explicitly. Sprockets assumes you are requiring a .js file when done from within a .js file

require_directory

The file extensions used on an asset determine what preprocessing is applied.

Additional layers of preprocessing can be requested by adding other extensions, where each extension is processed in a right-to-left manner

require_self

In development mode, assets are served as separate files in the order they are specified in the manifest file.

when these files are requested they are processed by the processors provided by the coffee-script and sass gems and then sent back to the browser as JavaScript and CSS respectively.

css.scss.erb

js.coffee.erb

Keep in mind the order of these preprocessors is important.

By default Rails assumes that assets have been precompiled and will be served as static assets by your web server

with the Asset Pipeline the :cache and :concat options aren't used anymore

Assets are compiled and cached on the first request after the server is started

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Debug mode can also be enabled in Rails helper methods

If you set config.assets.initialize_on_precompile to false, be sure to test rake assets:precompile locally before deploying

By default Rails assumes assets have been precompiled and will be served as static assets by your web server.

a rake task to compile the asset manifests and other files in the pipeline

RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake assets:precompile

a recipe to handle this in deployment

config/initializers/assets.rb

The initialize_on_precompile change tells the precompile task to run without invoking Rails

The X-Sendfile header is a directive to the web server to ignore the response from the application, and instead serve a specified file from disk

the jquery-rails gem which comes with Rails as the standard JavaScript library gem.

Possible options for JavaScript compression are :closure, :uglifier and :yui

concatenate assets