If your Rails apps are anything like mine, one of the slowest parts of your deployment is waiting for asset pipeline precompilation. It's sometimes so slow, it's painful. So I went searching for some solutions. turbo-sprockets helped, but it's not a silver bullet. This gem isn't a silver bullet either, but it can help. Capistrano Local Precompile takes a different approach. It builds your assets locally and rsync's them to your web server(s).

Note: This gem is not yet compatible with Capistrano 3.

Add capistrano-local-precompile to your Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem 'capistrano-local-precompile', require: false
end

Then add the following line to your deploy.rb:

require 'capistrano/local_precompile'

If you are using turbo-sprockets, just set it to enabled. Your asset will still compile locally, but they'll use turbosprockets to do so:

set :turbosprockets_enabled, true

If you don't want to grant access to production's database from outside you can add:

set :use_local_env, true

and local precompile will happen with a custom environment. For example if your production's environment is setup as 'production', enabling :use_local_env precompile will happen with 'production-local' environment. To make it work you will have to define the new environment but it's worth to don't open your production's database to everyone.

Here's the full set of configurable options:

set :precompile_cmd             # default: bundle exec rake assets:precompile
set :assets_dir                 # default: "public/assets"
set :rsync_cmd                  # default: "rsync -av"

set :turbosprockets_enabled     # default: false
set :turbosprockets_backup_dir  # default: "public/.assets"
set :cleanexpired_cmd           # default: bundle exec rake assets:clean_expired
set :use_local_env              # default: false

This gem is derived from gists by uhlenbrock and keighl.

Pull requests welcome: fork, make a topic branch, commit (squash when possible) with tests and I'll happily consider.

Copyright (c) 2013 Steve Agalloco. See LICENSE for detail