Elastic Beanstalk not loading assets for Ruby on R

Question

I have a ruby on rails application that works locally in production locally but will not work when I upload it to EB, It breaks everything.

When it is local it looks like this

And here is my eb site, I have included on with the errors form the console, but you get the idea

Here is my production.rb

Rails.application.configure do
  # Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/application.rb.

  # Code is not reloaded between requests.
  config.cache_classes = true

  # Eager load code on boot. This eager loads most of Rails and
  # your application in memory, allowing both threaded web servers
  # and those relying on copy on write to perform better.
  # Rake tasks automatically ignore this option for performance.
  config.eager_load = true

  # Full error reports are disabled and caching is turned on.
  config.consider_all_requests_local       = false
  config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

  # Enable Rack::Cache to put a simple HTTP cache in front of your application
  # Add `rack-cache` to your Gemfile before enabling this.
  # For large-scale production use, consider using a caching reverse proxy like
  # NGINX, varnish or squid.
  # config.action_dispatch.rack_cache = true

  # Disable serving static files from the `/public` folder by default since
  # Apache or NGINX already handles this.
  config.serve_static_files = true

  # Compress JavaScripts and CSS.
  config.assets.js_compressor = :uglifier
  # config.assets.css_compressor = :sass

  # Do not fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed.
  config.assets.compile = true

  # Asset digests allow you to set far-future HTTP expiration dates on all assets,
  # yet still be able to expire them through the digest params.
  config.assets.digest = true

  # `config.assets.precompile` and `config.assets.version` have moved to config/initializers/assets.rb

  # Specifies the header that your server uses for sending files.
  # config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = 'X-Sendfile' # for Apache
  # config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = 'X-Accel-Redirect' # for NGINX

  # Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport-Security, and use secure cookies.
  # config.force_ssl = true

  # Use the lowest log level to ensure availability of diagnostic information
  # when problems arise.
  config.log_level = :debug

  # Prepend all log lines with the following tags.
  # config.log_tags = [ :subdomain, :uuid ]

  # Use a different logger for distributed setups.
  # config.logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(SyslogLogger.new)

  # Use a different cache store in production.
  # config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store

  # Enable serving of images, stylesheets, and JavaScripts from an asset server.
  # config.action_controller.asset_host = 'http://assets.example.com'

  # Ignore bad email addresses and do not raise email delivery errors.
  # Set this to true and configure the email server for immediate delivery to raise delivery errors.
  # config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

  # Enable locale fallbacks for I18n (makes lookups for any locale fall back to
  # the I18n.default_locale when a translation cannot be found).
  config.i18n.fallbacks = true

  # Send deprecation notices to registered listeners.
  config.active_support.deprecation = :notify

  # Use default logging formatter so that PID and timestamp are not suppressed.
  config.log_formatter = ::Logger::Formatter.new

  # Do not dump schema after migrations.
  config.active_record.dump_schema_after_migration = false
end

I have tried making

  config.serve_static_files = true
  config.assets.compile = true

False and it still doesn't work.

Any help?

Answer 1

This is due to Nginx config (in /etc/nginx/conf.d/webapp_healthd.conf).
When a request for /assets/anything is made, Nginx will look by itself in /var/app/current/public/assets.
This means any asset not present in /public/assets won't load

My ugly solution:

# config/application.rb
config.assets.prefix = '/some_other_path'

Note that this will slow assets requests as those will be processed by Puma and not directly by Nginx.

Answer 2

I encountered a similar error when deploying my React on Rails 5 application to Elastic Beanstalk for production (was previously in Heroku in production). I came to solution from a different angle, adjusting the nginx default configuration. My problem was content from public/packs/ was not being served as packs/, which is how the <%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %> was producing the link in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb. I added the following location directive at the end of /etc/nginx/conf.d/webapp_healthd.conf to remedy the issue:

  location /packs {
    alias /var/app/current/public/packs;
    gzip_static on;
    expires 1y;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
    add_header Last-Modified "";
    add_header ETag "";
  }

After ssh-ing into the app server, adding this directive, and sudo su; service nginx restart, static content from public/packs/ was correctly served as packs/. I believe this location directive can be added through a config file in .ebextensions to automate this change to the default elastic beanstalk nginx conf file.