How to precompile assets with Chef?

Question

OpsWorks isn\'t precompiling assets on deploy. I found this recipe in this thread but I think it\'s not complete though, or missing something because I get an error about

Answer 1

I know very little about OpsWorks and Chef, but here's what I did to get it working.

First, I had to create a rails recipe that runs during the setup event to create the symlink directory for the assets. This sits in a public repo that OpsWorks can access.

cookbooks/rails/recipes/symlink_assets.rb:

node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
  Chef::Log.info("Ensuring shared/assets directory for #{application} app...")

  directory "#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/shared/assets" do
    group deploy[:group]
    owner deploy[:user]
    mode 0775
    action :create
    recursive true
  end
end

Then, in my app, I had to create deploy/before_migrate.rb:

Chef::Log.info("Running deploy/before_migrate.rb...")

Chef::Log.info("Symlinking #{release_path}/public/assets to #{new_resource.deploy_to}/shared/assets")

link "#{release_path}/public/assets" do
  to "#{new_resource.deploy_to}/shared/assets"
end

rails_env = new_resource.environment["RAILS_ENV"]
Chef::Log.info("Precompiling assets for RAILS_ENV=#{rails_env}...")

execute "rake assets:precompile" do
  cwd release_path
  command "bundle exec rake assets:precompile"
  environment "RAILS_ENV" => rails_env
end

This get called during the deployment process and compiles the assets.