Rails using cached application.css despite changes

Question

I have a Rails 3.1 application that uses SASS. The application.css.scss file looks like:

@import 'reset.css';
@import '960.css';
@import 'pages/master.css.scss';

I have a watchr script that touches application.css.scss whenever one of the @imported files is changed.

For a while this setup worked fine. Ever since last week (and I'm not sure why), Rails has been pulling a cached version of application.css for the webpages despite all my attempts at restarting the app, re-touching application.css.scss, etc. I've also deleted .sass-cache to no effect.

Any ideas?

Shouldn't your application manifest automatically rebuild the file on its own? Your running in development right? — Devin M
– Devin M, Commented Aug 12, 2011 at 21:26
Could you check modification time of your application.css? It might be set to some future date. — Alex Zolotko
– Alex Zolotko, Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 9:04

76484 · Accepted Answer · 2025-02-03 18:01:00Z

15

I had the same issue. I stopped the server, executed rm -fr tmp/cache, and my css files were finally rebuilt.

edited Feb 3 at 18:01

76484

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answered Sep 20, 2012 at 21:07

Greg Dan

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1 Comment

pizza247 Over a year ago

ugh, that was such a pain to debug. And it just cropped up out of nowhere. Thanks for the tip, total lifesaver.

cianmce · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-20 16:10:53Z

9

If you replace @import 'file.css'; with @import 'file'; in your application.scss that should allow it to be auto-refreshed in development mode

I had been using bin/rails tmp:clear until I removed the file extension

answered Aug 20, 2020 at 16:10

cianmce

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3 Comments

coryetzkorn Over a year ago

This finally fixed it for me! CSS changes are now automatically picked up on page refresh after removing the file extensions from imports.

Andrii Over a year ago

works for me also with scss instead of css! thanks!

nullqube Over a year ago

nice that worked

yuvilio · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-29 00:54:43Z

First, the usual cache clearing sanity checks might help. Clear browser cache. Clear server file cache (if you're in dev/test or can afford to in production) and sass-cache :

rake tmp:cache:clear
rm -fr tmp/sass-cache #or 'compass clean' if using compass

If that doesn't help, maybe Rails compiled ANOTHER application.css elsewhere (that didn't get removed by the cache clearing)?

For example, I ran compass watch app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss for debugging purposes and it created a public/assets/application.css file which, by virtue of it's location in public/, prevented any new application.css.scss stylesheet changes from being noticed by Rails. Once I removed it, the application again pulled from the .scss stylesheets. This is just one example of accidental overriding file creation. Try running a find on the entire application directory looking for any generated application.css files, doing this after the cache clearing to avoid those showing up in your results.

(FYI, to avoid my specific issue, I now run compass watch with --css-dir pointed at the cache to prevent my issue

$ compass watch app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss  --css-dir tmp/cache/

)

Andrei Nistor · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-19 11:04:19Z

8

I've had a similiar issue after running rake assets:precompile in development. Maybe Rails is serving precompiled assets from public/assets? Try cleaning that up.

You shouldn't need to touch aplication.css.scss in development, rails should serve the new content whenever one of the @included files changes.

Also, make sure you have the following in config/environments/development.rb

# Do not compress assets
config.assets.compress = false

# Expands the lines which load the assets
config.assets.debug = true

answered Dec 19, 2012 at 11:04

Andrei Nistor

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Comments

Abram · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-12 10:10:18Z

3

To wipe out the asset pipeline cache, a brute force rm -rf tmp/* will suffice. This has certainly fixed a few otherwise inexplicable CSS and JavaScript glitches in my experience. As a preventative measure, it might also be a good idea to clear the cache after upgrading gems or changing the asset pipeline configuration, although this may just be superstition.

Finally, if you are experimenting with rake assets:precompile in your development environment (more on this in a later article), you’ll also want to rm -rf public/assets/* afterwards to clean that up.

http://blog.55minutes.com/2012/02/untangling-the-rails-asset-pipeline-part-1-caches-and-compass/

answered Nov 12, 2012 at 10:10

Abram

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Comments

Chloe · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-08 03:26:35Z

2

You can invoke Rails automagic cache busting by doing the following:

Rename the SASS file as a partial, i.e. with an underscore prefix. E.g. _master.css.scss
Remove the extension from the import. You can keep the paths, but exclude the underscore. E.g. @import 'pages/master';

Now you can make changes in master and have them reflected without messing with the cache manually.

(Note: I'm on Rails 4.2)

edited Feb 8, 2020 at 3:26

Chloe

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answered Jan 24, 2020 at 11:55

Quinn Frederick

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2 Comments

Chloe Over a year ago

OMG this is the answer I've been looking for for 6 hours! It must be some type of miracle that you answered 14 days before me on a 9 year old question! (Rails 5.0)

pixatlazaki Over a year ago

Anyone know why this is?

user10375 · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-23 14:24:13Z

0

I had a similar issue with Rails 6.0.3.1 today. I had to re-touch application.scss so that rails didn't use the cached version.

Running rake tmp:cache:clear helped, but it's annoying because I had to run the command every time I updated any partial scss file. :(

answered May 23, 2020 at 14:24

user10375

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Comments

hajpoj · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-12 01:47:46Z

-1

Random I was having a caching issue related to using twitter bootstrap and application.css.scss. Basically I changed application.css.scss to just plain application.css and fixed my problem. Maybe this can help you? If you haven't figured it out already.

answered Jan 12, 2012 at 1:47

hajpoj

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1 Comment

Chloe Over a year ago

Won't work if you have variables or Sass in your application.scss!

Christopher Davies · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-10 22:32:30Z

I was having this problem, but I was actually putting css into application.css, rather than into files that it included. I cleared out application.css to simply include all of my css. So, my application.css now looks like this:

/*
 * This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into application.css, which will include all the files
 * listed below.
 *
 * Any CSS and SCSS file within this directory, lib/assets/stylesheets, vendor/assets/stylesheets,
 * or vendor/assets/stylesheets of plugins, if any, can be referenced here using a relative path.
 *
 * You're free to add application-wide styles to this file and they'll appear at the top of the
 * compiled file, but it's generally better to create a new file per style scope.
 *
 *= require_self
 *= require 'bootstrap.min'
 *= require 'global'
 */

My changes are reflected any time I change one of the included files (e.g. global.css)

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