Ruby on Rails Asset Pipeline Manifest Files and Directives
Example
In the assets initalizer (config/initializers/assets.rb) are a few files explicitly defined to be precompiled.
# Precompile additional assets.
# application.coffee, application.scss, and all non-JS/CSS in app/assets folder are already added.
# Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )
In this example the application.coffee and application.scss are so called 'Manifest Files'. This files should be used to include other JavaScript or CSS assets. The following command are available:
require <path>: Therequiredirective functions similar to Ruby's ownrequire. It provides a way to declare a dependency on a file in your path and ensures it's only loaded once before the source file.require_directory <path>: requires all the files inside a single directory. It's similar topath/*since it does not follow nested directories.require_tree <path>: requires all the nested files in a directory. Its glob equivalent ispath/**/*.require_self: causes the body of the current file to be inserted before any subsequentrequiredirectives. Useful in CSS files, where it's common for the index file to contain global styles that need to be defined before other dependencies are loaded.stub <path>: remove a file from being includeddepend_on <path>: Allows you to state a dependency on a file without including it. This is used for caching purposes. Any changes made to the dependency file will invalidate the cache of the source file.
An application.scss file could look like:
/*
*= require bootstrap
*= require_directory .
*= require_self
*/
Another example is the application.coffee file. Here with including jquery and Turbolinks:
#= require jquery2
#= require jquery_ujs
#= require turbolinks
#= require_tree .
If you don't use CoffeeScript, but plain JavaScript, the syntax would be:
//= require jquery2
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require turbolinks
//= require_tree .
