Rails App with webpacker Assets not found on droplet

Hey!

The issue you’re facing with assets not being found in your Rails app on the droplet, while everything works fine locally, is a common issue related to asset compilation and serving in the production environment. Here are several steps and checks to ensure your assets are correctly compiled and served:

1. *: In the production environment, Rails doesn’t compile assets on the fly like it does in development. You need to precompile your assets. Run the following command in your app’s root directory on your droplet:

   RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile
   

   This command compiles all your assets, including JavaScript and CSS, and places them in the public/assets or public/packs directory, depending on whether you are using the webpacker or sprockets.

2. After precompilation, ensure that the public/packs directory contains your compiled assets. If the assets are not there, the precompilation might have failed, and you’ll need to check the logs for any errors.

3. If you’re using Webpacker, check your config/webpacker.yml file. Ensure that the settings under the production section are correct. Particularly, look for the public_output_path setting; it should typically be set to packs.

4. If you’re using an asset host or CDN, ensure that the config.action_controller.asset_host in your config/environments/production.rb is set correctly. If you’re not using an asset host, ensure this is either commented out or set appropriately.

5. Make sure that webpacker is installed correctly on the production server. You can run bundle exec rails webpacker:install to ensure it’s set up properly. However, be careful as this might overwrite some custom configurations.

6. After precompiling your assets, restart your Rails server to ensure it picks up the changes:

   sudo systemctl restart your-rails-app-service
   

   Replace your-rails-app-service with the actual service name if you’re using a system service to manage your Rails app. If not, just stop and start the Rails server manually.

7. If you’re using Nginx or Apache as a reverse proxy, make sure that the configuration is correctly serving your assets. For Nginx, you should have a location block that looks something like this:

   location ~ ^/(assets|packs)/ {
     root /path/to/your/app/public;
     gzip_static on;
     expires max;
     add_header Cache-Control public;
   }
   

   Adjust the /path/to/your/app/public to the actual path of your app’s public directory.

Best,

Bobby