For the first time ever today I wrote a rails plugin! I googled around first to make sure no-one had solved the particular problem I needed fixing but no-one seemed to have done, so I had no choice but to jump into the rails core…
The problem
In RubyonRails using the asset link tag such as:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "screen", :media=>"screen, projection" %>
results in something like this on your HTML:
<link href="/stylesheets/screen.css?1234174480" media="screen, projection" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
(view source on the Recycling Group Finder for the original). The number after the question mark (‘?1234174480’) is the asset ID. The idea behind the asset ID is that you can configure your web-server to set an Expires headers for your static assets far into the future causing browsers to cache the asset, but by changing the number (Rails does this automatically) you indicate to the browser that a file has changed and that the browser should re-fetch it. It works most of the time, but there are some mis-configured proxies out there (and possibly browsers too) that will cache the asset even when the asset id changes.
There’s a good description of the problem over on the sproutcore blog.
The Solution
This is where my plugin comes in, altering the asset URL with the asset ID in the URL, eg:
/stylesheets/screen.css?1234174480
becomes:
/stylesheets/1234174480/screen.css
Placing the asset ID in the URL, not the query causes proxies and browsers to see a different asset and so to fetch what it sees as a completely new asset. It will then cache the asset and if you change the asset ID the same thing will happen, no more over-cached assets!
Installing it
Easy, just:
$ cd rails_project_base_dir && script/plugin install git://github.com/wjessop/asset-format.git
start up your app and your asset URLs will be magically transformed! You will need a rewrite in your web-server config to rewrite the request back to the asset, so:
/stylesheets/1234174480/screen.css -> /stylesheets/screen.css
an you are all set!
