How to use custom fonts in Rails 6 with Webpack

Question

For my newly started Rails 6 application I want to have a set of customs fonts. My setup looks like this:

# app/assets/stylesheets/my-font.sass

@font-face
  font-family: 'my-font'
  src: url('fonts/my-font.eot') format('embedded-opentype'), url('fonts/my-font.woff') format('woff'), url('fonts/my-font.ttf') format('truetype'), url('fonts/my-font.svg#my-font') format('svg')
  font-weight: 400
  font-style: normal

And then under app/assets/stylesheets/fonts I have all 4 files referenced in the sass file.

My application.sass has the following import: @import 'my-font'.

When I run rails assets:precompile it also puts all 4 files with suffixed version (e.g. my-font-7384658374658237465837246587263458.eot) in the public directory.

BUT, when I run the application the browser is looking for a file in the root directory called my-font.eot, which of course isn't there and 404s. This looks definitely like a configuration problem to me, but where I have no idea. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you have the fonts inside /assets/ then use the asset-url helper.

src: asset-url('fonts/my-font.eot') format('embedded-opentype'),
     asset-url('fonts/my-font.woff') format('woff'),
     asset-url('fonts/my-font.ttf') format('truetype'),
     asset-url('fonts/my-font.svg#my-font') format('svg')

That way Sprockets will change "fonts/my-font.xxx" to the filename with the digest.

Personally I don't like to put fonts on the assets pipeline since they are probably not changing and only slows down your precompilation time, so I put them in public:

/public/fonts/my-font.eot
/public/fonts/my-font.woff
...ect...

And just use your original css code.

(This has nothing to do with webpack or webpacker)

Answer 2

1. Add your fonts into app/assets/fonts folder.

2. Now you need to tell Sprockets to load fonts in the first place. To do that, just add

   //= link_tree ../fonts to app/assets/config/manifest.js

Side note: you may come across advice to update initializers/assets.rb, but that is outdated, and Sprockets 4 wants you to add directive to load fonts to manifest.js.

3. You need to define font-face for use in your application, and your intention was right, but you need to use font-url instead of url for it to work, so

src: font-url('my-font.eot') format('embedded-opentype') ...

And notice that you don't need to specify fonts directory, because font-url already implies it.

Bonus: you can use this sass mixin that simplifies specifying alternative formats for your fonts.