Behold, a Rails app that can build and deploy Lineman assets easily. Under this approach, an application's JavaScript & CSS would be built by lineman but would flow through the asset pipeline like any other asset in a Rails application.
This gives you the productivity and organizational benefits of separating out your front-end source code with a first-class build tool in Lineman, but with the convenience of fitting into the typical Rails deployment story.
This repo was pushed to Heroku using the default Rails buildpack and can be demoed here.
Instructions on how to reproduce this repo's setup follows:
Add rails-lineman to your Gemfile.
gem 'rails-lineman'And configure the app to find your Lineman project. In this repo, that's done in config/application.rb:
config.rails_lineman.lineman_project_location = "my-lineman-app"Alternatively, rails-lineman will look for an environment variable named LINEMAN_PROJECT_LOCATION.
Just add the lineman-rails plugin to your project:
$ npm install --save-dev lineman-rails
This will set up some additional static routes and enable the API proxy. It will also disable the pages task.
When you're developing you'll want to start the Rails app:
$ bundle exec rails s
And separately start the Lineman app, which will proxy back to the Rails app:
$ lineman run
You'll actively develop on Lineman's port (default is localhost:8000) so that you'll be able to access the JS & CSS you're developing under Lineman as if it were layered on top of your Rails views & APIs.
Speaking of Rails views, whenever you want to include the Lineman JS & CSS in a Rails view or layout,
just include it like this in your ERB (in this app, see app/views/widgets/index.html.erb):
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "lineman/app" %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "lineman/app" %>If you're cloning this repo to play around, try hitting: localhost:8000/widgets and you should see Lineman's familiar hello world example render properly:
At deploy time, the rails-lineman gem will wrap the assets:precompile task such
that the Lineman assets are first built (by default, into
app/assets/javascripts/lineman and app/assets/stylesheets/lineman). Then the
asset pipeline will compile all of your assets as it normally would into
public/assets. Finally, the Lineman assets are removed from the app so they
don't clutter up your version control.
That is to say, when you precompile assets:
$ RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile
You'll see output include your Lineman bundles:
#...
I, [2013-12-21T16:06:11.354975 #44655] INFO -- : Writing /Users/justin/code/vagrants/oss/projects/javascript/lineman-plus-rails/my-rails-app/public/assets/lineman/app-e3428c9a812e9ed915d331ea97e88357.js
I, [2013-12-21T16:06:11.358738 #44655] INFO -- : Writing /Users/justin/code/vagrants/oss/projects/javascript/lineman-plus-rails/my-rails-app/public/assets/lineman/app-fb85a2e2e5fd3d180c60a66772648703.css
#...
Such that the public/assets folder looks like:
├── application-76c1a0ca10a36eee991a7b35233c7a93.js
├── application-76c1a0ca10a36eee991a7b35233c7a93.js.gz
├── application-fb85a2e2e5fd3d180c60a66772648703.css
├── application-fb85a2e2e5fd3d180c60a66772648703.css.gz
├── lineman
│ ├── app-e3428c9a812e9ed915d331ea97e88357.js
│ ├── app-e3428c9a812e9ed915d331ea97e88357.js.gz
│ ├── app-fb85a2e2e5fd3d180c60a66772648703.css
│ └── app-fb85a2e2e5fd3d180c60a66772648703.css.gz
└── manifest-c468cd8d56c4364af6110bc39b00ed40.json
Note that in Rails 4, Rails will by default not serve any static assets out of
public/assets when running in the production environment (leaving that up to
Apache/nginx). To verify this is all working you may need to configure in
config/environments/production.rb:
config.serve_static_assets = trueSomewhat humorously, rails-lineman will actually try to detect whether it's running on Heroku (by looking for STACK and DYNO environment variables) and will install Node.js and add it to the path so that it can build the lineman project.