CloudFront AssetHost

Easy deployment of your assets on CloudFront or S3. When enabled in production, your assets will be served from Cloudfront/S3 which will result in a speedier front-end.

Installing

Include the gem in your app's environment.rb or Gemfile. It is hosted at Gemcutter[http://gemcutter.org/gems/cloudfront_asset_host]

Dependencies

Make sure your s3-credentials are stored in config/s3.yml like this:

access_key_id: 'access_key'
secret_access_key: 'secret'

The gem relies on +openssl md5+ and +gzip+ utilities. Make sure they are available locally and on your servers.

Configuration

Create an initializer to configure the plugin config/initializers/cloudfront_asset_host.rb

# Simple configuration
CloudfrontAssetHost.configure do |config|
  config.bucket = "bucketname" # required
  config.enabled = true if Rails.env.production? # only enable in production
end

# Extended configuration
CloudfrontAssetHost.configure do |config|
  config.bucket     = "bucketname"        # required
  config.cname      = "assets.domain.com" # if you have a cname configured for your distribution or bucket
  config.key_prefix = "app/"              # if you share the bucket and want to keep things separated
  config.s3_config  = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/s3.yml" # Alternative location of your s3-config file

  # gzip related configuration
  config.gzip       = true                # enable gzipped assets (defaults to true)
  config.gzip_extensions = ['js', 'css']  # only gzip javascript or css (defaults to %w(js css))
  config.gzip_prefix = "gz"               # prefix for gzipped bucket (defaults to "gz")

  config.enabled    = true if Rails.env.production? # only enable in production
end

Usage

Uploading your assets

Run CloudfrontAssetHost::Uploader.upload!(:verbose => true, :dryrun => false) before your deployment. Put it for example in your Rakefile or capistrano-recipe. Verbose output will include information about which keys are being uploaded. Enabling dryrun will skip the actual upload if you're just interested to see what will be uploaded.

Hooks

If the plugin is enabled. Rails' internal asset_host and asset_id functionality will be overridden to point to the location of the assets on Cloudfront.

Other plugins

When using in combination with SASS and/or asset_packager it is recommended to generate the css-files and package your assets before uploading them to Cloudfront. For example, call Sass::Plugin.update_stylesheets and Synthesis::AssetPackage.build_all first.

Compatibility

Tested on Rails 2.3.5 with SASS and AssetPackager plugins

Copyright

Created at Wakoopa