Clear the cache from the Rails asset pipeline

Question

I'm starting a new project in Rails, and it looks like the application.js manifest file is doing something funny with the javascripts that I reference - does it cache those files as part of the asset pipeline?

Here's what happened. I added a javascript file named jquery.autoresize.js to the vendor/assets/javascripts folder, and then referenced the file in the application.js manifest like this:

//= require jquery.autoresize.js 

Then I started up the rails server. But after navigating around in my app, I realized that I had accidentally added the wrong version of the jquery.autoresize.js file. So, I deleted that file and then added the correct version to the vendor/assets/javascripts folder. But, to my horror, when I reloaded the page, it is still loading the old javascript file.

I tried emptying my browser cache, then exiting and restarting the Rails server, but to no avail. I hacked a solution together by simply renaming my javascript file and referencing the new name, which worked fine. But there has got to be a better solution to this.

Does the new asset pipeline cache the files you reference somehow? If so, how can I clear that cache? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I'm assuming we're talking about the production environment.

When you change any of your javascripts or stylesheets in the production environment, you need to run rake assets:precompile; this task compiles and compresses the various .js and .css files and creates the application.js and application.css files that is loaded by your views.

It's possible that if you replaced jquery.autoresize.js with a version with an older timestamp, the precompile step might skip it, thinking the compiled version is up-to-date. You can avoid that by running rake assets:clean first, forcing it to rebuild everything in the public/assets directory from scratch.