Guard::RailsAssets

Guard::RailsAssets compiles the assets within Rails 3.1 application whenever those change.

Tested on MRI 1.9.2 (please report if it works on your platform).

If you have any questions please contact me @dnagir.

Install

Please be sure to have Guard installed.

Add it to your Gemfile, preferably inside the test and development group:

gem 'guard-rails-assets'

Add guard definition to your Guardfile by running:

$ bundle exec guard init rails-assets

Configuration for Jasmine

In order to make it work better with Jasmine it is recommended to explicitly move files precompiled for testing into a separate directory. This way it doesn't conflict with any files in public/assets.

This is optional and you can skip it for now.

But if you are in for that, then:

Add the option config.assets.prefix = 'public/assets-test' to config/environments/test.rb .
Replace all public/assets with public/assets-test in spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml.
Add public/assets* to your .gitignore (if you haven't yet).

Options

In addition to the guard configuration, guard-rails-assets has options to specify when exacly to precompile assets.

:start - compile assets when the guard starts (enabled by default)
:change - compile assets when watched files change (enabled by default)
:reload - compile assets when the guard quites (Ctrl-C) (not enabled by default)
:all - compile assets when running all the guards (Ctrl-/) (not enabled by default)

You can also set the :runner option:

:cli - compile assets using the rake task - the most correct method, but slow.
:rails - compile assets by loading rails environment (default) - fast, but does not pick up changes. Additionally it relies on a single instance of your app to be loaded, so you can't have multiple guards with different rails configurations.

Additional options are:

:rails_env - specify the Rails environment to use (defaults to 'test').
:digest - overrides the config.asset.digest setting (for production env it is usually true, for test - false).

For example:

# This is the default behaviour
guard 'rails-assets', :run_on => [:start, :change], :runner => :rails, :rails_env => 'test' do
  watch(%r{^app/assets/.+$})
end

# compile ONLY when something changes
guard 'rails-assets', :run_on => :change do
  watch(%r{^app/assets/.+$})
end

# compile when something changes and when starting
guard 'rails-assets', :run_on => [:start, :change] do
  watch(%r{^app/assets/.+$})
end

Development

Source hosted at GitHub
Report issues and feature requests to GitHub Issues

Pull requests are very welcome!

Licensed under WTFPL or MIT