Assets::Watchify

Fast serving Rails assets in development.

Useful for Rails applications with hundreds of JavaScript files (eg Backbone Marionette at client side).

This Gem doesn't use Watchify, Browserify or Node.js. Rails Assets Pipeline is smart enough to do all the job. We just set a couple of hooks.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'assets-watchify', group: :development

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install assets-watchify

Create folder public/assets/w6y and start rails server.

The Gem:

• Instructs Rails to concatenate CSS files together
• Installs hook on generating JavaScript tag
• Combines all JavaScript assets into single file
• Generates SourceMap for concatenated JavaScript
• Listens to changes in asset folders and rebuilds JavaScript files

For Rails v3 it's enough.

Rails v4 (if not using puma) is slooow serving large files (and combined JavaScript is large!). Use nginx as reverse proxy:

server {
  listen 80;

  root  /my/Rails/app/public;

  location @Rails {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
  }

  location / {
    try_files $uri @Rails;
  }
}

It's useful sometimes to compile large JavaScript on Rails server start. Request this with preload method:

# config/initializers/watchify.rb
Assets::Watchify.preload 'application.js', 'my/other.js' rescue nil

preload without arguments is preload 'application.js'.

• OpenSSL::Win::Root
• ExecJS::Xtrn

• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• nginx
• Gem source_map
• Listen
• Backbone Marionette