assets:precompile not compiling CSS assets

Questions / Help
1

This is probably not a Fly issue; but on the odd chance that this is related to static files/nginx or some like setting like that, I’m posting here. Also want to note that when I build and run the same exact Dockerfile locally, I don’t get this issue.

I suddenly started having this problem in my production box where most of the css assets are compiled, except for the 3 assets I tell dartsass to build, application.css and two others here:

config/initializers/dartsass.rb

# config/initializers/dartsass.rb
Rails.application.config.dartsass.builds = {
  "application.scss" => "application.css",
  "mailer.scss" => "mailer.css",
  "active_admin.scss" => "active_admin.css"
}

Immediately after deploying, public/assets only has the scss files and the .manifest.json also does not reference the .css files (because they don’t exist in public/assets:

root@3d8d9296ce7948:/rails# cat public/assets/.manifest.json 
{"active_admin.js":"active_admin-9383b93bd6d1d9fa0a36586f11fbb66bf00abbe8.js","application.scss":"application-7596f0d55dbc14bbba8357ba2519b6a92c1ba3e5.scss","active_admin.scss":"active_admin-b3484b0fe9d5b655c7bfabf44d4844d3f578e38c.scss","base/sizes.scss":"base/

root@3d8d9296ce7948:/rails# ls public/assets/ | grep application
application-7596f0d55dbc14bbba8357ba2519b6a92c1ba3e5.scss
application-8c437f3aabfc2ca3fdda87f69e6041a7e3c5f5e3.js

After I run assets:precompile again on the box, the assets are generated:

root@3d8d9296ce7948:/rails# bin/rails assets:precompile
I, [2024-02-24T22:12:30.174296 #329]  INFO -- : Writing application-23b791d200e0a4700af4b77c5bd2aea477b5575c.css
I, [2024-02-24T22:12:30.205423 #329]  INFO -- : Writing active_admin-9d8f9c30e6ef1f119225b74cf213f50721c80914.css
I, [2024-02-24T22:12:30.205963 #329]  INFO -- : Writing mailer-0e34617c354ffe5379b296cf599c202195eab754.css
root@3d8d9296ce7948:/rails# ls public/assets/ | grep application
application-23b791d200e0a4700af4b77c5bd2aea477b5575c.css

root@3d8d9296ce7948:/rails# cat public/assets/.manifest.json 
{"application.css":"application-23b791d200e0a4700af4b77c5bd2aea477b5575c.css","active_admin.css":"active_admin-9d8f9c30e6ef1f119225b74cf213f50721c80914.css","mailer.css":"mailer-0e34617c354ffe5379b296cf599c202195eab754.css"

The thing is, I am already doing assets:precompile in my Dockerfile and copying the output to the final image:

FROM ... as build

# Precompiling assets for production without requiring secret RAILS_MASTER_KEY
RUN SECRET_KEY_BASE=DUMMY ./bin/rails assets:precompile

...

COPY --from=build /rails /rails

Not sure why this started happening, as I haven’t updated much of anything. Appreciate any ideas.

gem versions:
rails (7.0.7.2)
propshaft (0.8.0)
dartsass-rails (0.5.0)
2

I don’t know what’s causing this. The only difference between assets:precompile at build time and after deploy should be access to secrets.

What I do in cases like these is run:

fly console --dockerfile Dockerfile -C bash

In this way, I can quickly test the effects of changes to the Dockerfile without having to worry about whether the server can start or having to ssh in.

3

Okay this was extremely unexpected.

After reading cssbundling-rails’ (which I don’t use in my project) documentation, I found this: GitHub - rails/cssbundling-rails: Bundle and process CSS in Rails with Tailwind, PostCSS, and Sass via Node.js.

You must have app/assets/builds available. Add the directory with a .gitkeep file, and you’ll ensure it’s available in production.

And that was it – the assets were digested correctly.

This is a bit perplexing because in the Fly production VM, I could find the assets compiled by dartsass-rails in that same exact folder (app/assets/builds/*.css), so I knew the folder existed; but the digested application-7577900c40f86606a5c6acaa00076c57a63f48a6.css etc were not in public/assets, so I also knew propshaft was not finding anything in app/assets/builds. There must be a dir creation order issue somewhere between dartsass-rails and propshaft.

Anyway, someone ought to add that warning to propshaft’s documentation I guess.

4

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