Rails using cached application.css despite changes

Question

I have a Rails 3.1 application that uses SASS. The application.css.scss file looks like:

@import 'reset.css';
@import '960.css';
@import 'pages/master.css.scss';

I have a watchr script that touches application.css.scss whenever one of the @imported files is changed.

For a while this setup worked fine. Ever since last week (and I'm not sure why), Rails has been pulling a cached version of application.css for the webpages despite all my attempts at restarting the app, re-touching application.css.scss, etc. I've also deleted .sass-cache to no effect.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

I had the same issue. I stopped the server, executed rm -fr tmp/cache, and my css files were finally rebuild.

Solution 2

First, the usual cache clearing sanity checks might help. Clear browser cache. Clear server file cache (if you're in dev/test or can afford to in production) and sass-cache :

rake tmp:cache:clear
rm -fr tmp/sass-cache #or 'compass clean' if using compass

If that doesn't help, maybe Rails compiled ANOTHER application.css elsewhere (that didn't get removed by the cache clearing)?

For example, I ran compass watch app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss for debugging purposes and it created a public/assets/application.css file which, by virtue of it's location in public/, prevented any new application.css.scss stylesheet changes from being noticed by Rails. Once I removed it, the application again pulled from the .scss stylesheets. This is just one example of accidental overriding file creation. Try running a find on the entire application directory looking for any generated application.css files, doing this after the cache clearing to avoid those showing up in your results.

(FYI, to avoid my specific issue, I now run compass watch with --css-dir pointed at the cache to prevent my issue

$ compass watch app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss  --css-dir tmp/cache/

)

Solution 3

I've had a similiar issue after running rake assets:precompile in development. Maybe Rails is serving precompiled assets from public/assets? Try cleaning that up.

You shouldn't need to touch aplication.css.scss in development, rails should serve the new content whenever one of the @included files changes.

Also, make sure you have the following in config/environments/development.rb

# Do not compress assets
config.assets.compress = false

# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = true

Solution 4

If you replace @import 'file.css'; with @import 'file'; in your application.scss that should allow it to be auto-refreshed in development mode

I had been using bin/rails tmp:clear until I removed the file extension

Solution 5

To wipe out the asset pipeline cache, a brute force rm -rf tmp/* will suffice. This has certainly fixed a few otherwise inexplicable CSS and JavaScript glitches in my experience. As a preventative measure, it might also be a good idea to clear the cache after upgrading gems or changing the asset pipeline configuration, although this may just be superstition.

Finally, if you are experimenting with rake assets:precompile in your development environment (more on this in a later article), you’ll also want to rm -rf public/assets/* afterwards to clean that up.

http://blog.55minutes.com/2012/02/untangling-the-rails-asset-pipeline-part-1-caches-and-compass/

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Comments

[thatmiddleway]

ugh, that was such a pain to debug. And it just cropped up out of nowhere. Thanks for the tip, total lifesaver.

[Chloe]

Won't work if you have variables or Sass in your application.scss!

[Chloe]

OMG this is the answer I've been looking for for 6 hours! It must be some type of miracle that you answered 14 days before me on a 9 year old question! (Rails 5.0)

[pixatlazaki]

Anyone know why this is?

[coryetzkorn]

This finally fixed it for me! CSS changes are now automatically picked up on page refresh after removing the file extensions from imports.

[Andrii]

works for me also with scss instead of css! thanks!