Best way to combine and minify JS / CSS on Heroku

Question

First of all, according to this answer, the :cache => true option on stylesheet_link_tag and javascript_include_tag doesn't work on Heroku. Is this true? I've found :cache => true to work occasionally, but not always (weird!)

Also, what's the best solution here? Ideally it would seamlessly combine and minify all CSS / JS. Heroku Asset Packager claims to do this -- are there better options?

Answer 1

I haven't tried it on heroku yet, but Sprockets might be good for that. Also, in the past, I've had more luck with

:cache => 'all.css'
:cache => 'all.js'

instead of 'true'

Answer 2

It's a different way to manage your CSS/Javascript but you may want to check out the Rails plugin shoebox.

Shoebox can do combining, minifying, and caching.

Answer 3

GitHub has a good answer for this, and I'm sure you could modify Heroku's deployment scripts to integrate:

http://github.com/blog/551-optimizing-asset-bundling-and-serving-with-rails

Answer 4

The project name says it all:

http://github.com/amasses/heroku_asset_packager

Answer 5

I'm using Jammit on Heroku. Works Great. You can locally build your assets and check in to heroku. use

jammit --force

the current version 0.5.1 has issues working on heroku but you can install the fixed version from git://github.com/documentcloud/jammit.git

If you are using Rails 3, specify the below in your bundler Gemfile:

gem "jammit", :git => "git://github.com/documentcloud/jammit.git"

For Rails 2.*

config.gem "jammit", :source => "git://github.com/documentcloud/jammit.git"

Good Luck.