Rails.application.assets is nil in production even during precompilation

[mrsimo]

First of all, I'm aware of #237 and I think I understand the reasoning. I wanted to explain our use case and see if it makes sense.

We have a situation where we want to embed a platform.css inside a platform.js. For this, in Rails 4 we used <%= Rails.application.assets['platform.css'].to_s %>. We can't switch to Rails.application.assets_manifest.find_sources because the platform.css isn't there the very first time you run assets:precompile.

We solved this issue by initializing a sprockets environment, using:

Sprockets::Railtie.build_environment(Rails.application, true)['platform.css'].to_s

Even though assets.compile is false, I would have expected that Rails.application.assets is available during the assest:precompile rake task. It is the production environment, but it's also the precompilation task.

I wonder if you'd reconsider this use case and if we can find an alternative. Thanks.

[rafaelfranca]

Does using the public API <%= depend_on_asset('platform.css').source %> works?

[mrsimo]

Oh, my. Had no idea depend_on_asset existed. It seems to work! Apologies for the noise and thanks for the solution!

[rafaelfranca]

No problem 😄. You can see all methods on that context here http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/sprockets/Sprockets/Context