Static image assets in rails app not displaying on Heroku production

Question

I tried pre-compiling my images before deployment using the command:

$ RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake assets:precompile

I am using image_tag's in my templates that work in development.

Update: config.serve_static_files is said to default to true in dev, but then is turned off in production because the assets should be provided via your web server. I currently am just using the free tier on heroku and am still running webrick, so I have this set to true, but no luck.

Update 2: When I set config.serve_static_files to false, heroku does not see any of my assets, all my stylings go away and images remain unfound. Although heroku does send a warning message upon pushing to master saying that all "config.serve_static_files does is enables serving everything in the public folder and is unrelated to the asset pipeline.". I suppose it is unrelated to the asset pipeline in that it is just serving up the assets in the public folder and does not look at our assets directory. I also see that heroku runs the precompile command upon deployment, so I don't need to do that each time.

This makes me wonder if the way I am calling my assets using the image_tag could be the problem, but I am not sure why that would be?

Update 3: The rails guide for the asset pipeline says "In regular views you can access images in the public/assets/images directory like this: <%= image_tag "rails.png" %>. I am calling for my image using this convention like so <%= image_tag("lab49", size: "80x30") %>, but the image will still not appear.

Update 4: See my answer.

In case it's useful, I had the same problem on fly.io (i.e. a platform other than heroku). So I think the issue is to do with dev vs production (rather than being specific to heroku). — stevec
– stevec, Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 12:37

Jbur43 · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-06 00:14:13Z

12

If you came to this post and you are using Heroku, Heroku will accept your images only if you use the image file extension.

This will work:

<%= image_tag "lab49.png", size: "80x30" %>

This will not work (although it will locally):

<%= image_tag "lab49", size: "80x30" %>

edited Sep 6, 2017 at 0:14

answered Feb 10, 2016 at 18:42

Jbur43

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3 Comments

Greg Over a year ago

You sir are a hero!

PrimeTimeTran Over a year ago

Confirmed this resolved the issue for me on 5.1.3. Thanks bro!

Jbur43 Over a year ago

Glad it helped!

Peter Tascio · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-05 17:22:44Z

3

Something to watch out for: I had jpeg files in my assets/images folder. When I ran rake assets:precompile they were turned into .jpg files. After renaming them in my assets/images folder to .jpg, precompiling, and pushing again they displayed on Heroku just fine.

answered Sep 5, 2017 at 17:22

Peter Tascio

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1 Comment

stevec Over a year ago

Same was happening to many others

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