Why use ASSET_PATH over Image-url when linking images in css in rails

Question

Let me start off by saying this is the worst part about rails. Coming from a .NET background, it's so easy to just write css like you would any standard HTML page but, nope, not in Rails, it blows up unless you do all this special crap.

My question is essentially this: why could I only get my images to load through the asset pipeline when i added a .erb to the end of application.css and wrote the background-image property like this:

background-image: url(<%= asset_path 'image.png' %>);

I don't get why these wouldn't work (ive tried 100 different things):

background-image: url('/assets/image.png');
background-image: url('assets/image.png');
background-image: image-url('image.png');
background-image: image-url('assets/image.png');
background-image: url(image.png);

FYI this is my production environment and everything is precompiled. Everything was working in development by just linking this way:

 background-image url('/assets/image.png');

but when I switched to production and precompiled, any image or font file had to be converted to the ASSET_PATH method of doing things or the images wouldnt show up....common issue?

Answer 1

You probably have something like this in your config/environments/production.rb file:

config.serve_static_assets = false

That's why it won't serve them directly.

As an aside: I've done .NET and Rails a good bit. A lot of this is just the differences between Rails and other systems. I do understand your frustration, though.