Rails 5 - How to include all vendor assets in the asset pipeline?

Question

I've found several different threads on including assets in the vendor/assets directory but did not find anything that worked for me. Previously, I had all of my vendor assets in the app/ directory but moved the JavaScript to the vendor/assets/javascripts/ directory and the CSS to the vendor/assets/stylesheets/ directory.

I'm now trying to load my vendor assets both in development and production, and they're not loading at all. Here's my assets.rb file:

# Be sure to restart your server when you modify this file.

# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets.
Rails.application.config.assets.version = '1.0'

# Add additional assets to the asset load path
# Rails.application.config.assets.paths << Emoji.images_path

# Precompile additional assets.
# application.js, application.css, and all non-JS/CSS in app/assets folder are already added.
Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += [
  Rails.root.join('vendor/assets/javascripts/*').to_s,
  Rails.root.join('vendor/assets/stylesheets/*').to_s
]

I've also tried adding the vendor/assets/ directories to Rails.application.config.assets.paths, and that didn't help.

How can I include all of the vendor assets in the asset pipeline?

UPDATE

I got my vendor JavaScript to load by adding the following to app/assets/javascripts/application.js:

//= require_tree ../../../vendor/assets/javascripts/.

However, I'm using Sass and am still not able to get the SCSS files to load.

Koetke

Did you restart your server when you added these lines? You should add the folder like this: config.assets.paths << Rails.root.join('vendor', 'assets') – Woolfell

@Woolfell Thank you for your comment. I did restart my server, and adding the folders in that way didn't work either unfortunately. – Koetke

Answer 1

I finally figured it out after remembering that the Rails asset load paths and Sprockets are different systems. Here's what I did:

In config/initializes/assets.rb, I added the following lines:

# Add additional assets to the asset load path
Rails.application.config.assets.paths += [
  Rails.root.join('vendor', 'assets').to_s
]

# Precompile additional assets.
# application.js, application.css, and all non-JS/CSS in app/assets folder are already added.
Rails.application.config.assets.precompile += [
  Rails.root.join('vendor/assets/javascripts/*').to_s,
  Rails.root.join('vendor/assets/stylesheets/*').to_s
]

The first block adds vendor assets to the Rails asset path. This allows me to use vendor assets in view helpers (ex: image_tag). The second block allows my vendor JavaScript and CSS to be precompiled with the rest of my assets.

Then, I added the following line to app/assets/javascripts/application.js above //= require_tree .:

//= require_tree ../../../vendor/assets/javascripts/.

This will automatically add to my application all of the JavaScript files I put into vendor/assets/javascripts.

For the Sass, I added the following to app/assets/stylesheets/application.sass:

@import "../../../vendor/assets/stylesheets/*";

I added this line before @import "*"; so that my own application's styles will take preference. This will include all of the vendor Sass files in with my application. Then I renamed all of my vendor .css files to use the .scss extension.

Now that development is working fine, I was worried about precompilation. I ran rails assets:precompile locally, and sure enough, all of my vendor assets were included!

Koetke