Asset Pipeline Scavenger Hunt

assert_pipeline_scavenger_hunt.md

• What does it mean to concatenate files? Find an image of an example concatenated file. Why would we want to concatenate files?

  • To concatenate files is to add files together.
  • .
  • You would conecatenate files to limit the amount of times we make a trip to the server.

• What does it mean to precompile files? What does this have to do with coffeescript and sass files?

  • Before we send a file to the browser, we have to precompile it to a language that the browser can handle (HTML, CSS & JS).
  • If we are using a language that makes it easier to program in a certain language like Coffeescript, Sass or ERB, we have to first precompile it before serving it up to the browser.

• What does it mean to minify files? Find an image of an example minified file. Why would we want to minify files?

  • Getting rid of any unecessary white space.
  • 
  • The files won't be read, so we minify to cut down on the size of the file.

• Start up the server for Catch 'em All (rails s) and navigate to http://localhost:3000/assets/application.js. Then open up the code for application.js in your text editor. Why are these not the same?

  • They are not the same because the asset pipeline automatically joins all your CSS & JS assets into one file to cut down on the number of requests we make to the database.

• What is a manifest (in terms of the asset pipeline)? Where can you find two manifests in Catch 'em All?

  • It gives sprockets directives. They hold the instructions for which files to include in order to build the CSS & JS files for our application.

• In regular HTML files, we bring in css files with . How is this done in a Rails project? Where do you see this line in Catch 'em All?

  • In a Rails project, we use the stylesheet_link_tag helper. You see this in the application.html.erb file in app/views/layouts

• How is a digest/fingerprint used on the assets for caching purposes?

  • Fingerprinting is a technique that makes the name of a file dependent on the contents of the file. Everytime we make a change to a asset file, the digest changes. The reason we do this is becuase if a client caches an asset, we need a way to tell the client that the asset has been updated and you should instead cache this newer version.