Local Rails 4 assets precompilation using Capistrano 3 and rsync

application.rb

# Speed things up by not loading Rails env
config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

deploy.rb

# Updated to work with Capistrano 3 and Rails 4; compiles assets in given stage in order
# to use settings for that stage ... rm assets when we're done

namespace :deploy do
  after :updated, "assets:precompile"
end

namespace :assets do
  desc "Precompile assets locally and then rsync to web servers"
  task :precompile do
    on roles(:web) do
      rsync_host = host.to_s # this needs to be done outside run_locally in order for host to exist
      run_locally do
        with rails_env: fetch(:stage) do
          execute :bundle, "exec rake assets:precompile"
        end
        execute "rsync -av --delete ./public/assets/ #{fetch(:user)}@#{rsync_host}:#{shared_path}/public/assets/"
        execute "rm -rf public/assets"
        # execute "rm -rf tmp/cache/assets" # in case you are not seeing changes
      end
    end
  end
end

Hi, do you require 'capistrano/rails/assets'?

no, you don't need to require that since this task replaces it

I had to make some changes to get this working with Rails 4.1, Capistrano 3.2.1: https://gist.github.com/buntine/bf9d27ebbacba53e5c32

This docs https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails-asset-pipeline says about

    config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

In Rails 4.x this option has been removed and is no longer needed.

Someone indent that code it makes kittens cry 😄 and also rake assets:clobber instead of rm -rf maybe?