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.

Why?

Hosting your assets on CloudFront ensures minimum latency for all your visitors. But deploying your assets requires some additional management that this gem provides.

Expiration

The best way to expire your assets on CloudFront is to upload the asset to a new unique url. The gem will calculate the MD5-hash of the asset and incorporate that into the URL.

Efficient uploading

By using the MD5-hash we can easily determined which assets aren't uploaded yet. This speeds up the deployment considerably.

Compressed assets

CloudFront will not serve compressed assets automatically. To counter this, the gem will upload gzipped javascripts and stylesheets and serve them when the user-agent supports it.

Installing

gem install cloudfront_asset_host

Include the gem in your app's environment.rb or Gemfile.

Dependencies

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

Configuration

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

access_key_id: 'access_key'
secret_access_key: 'secret'

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.

Contributing

Feel free to fork the project and send pull-requests.

Known Limitations

• Does not delete old assets

Compatibility

Tested on Rails 2.3.5 with SASS and AssetPackager plugins

Copyright

Created at Wakoopa

Copyright (c) 2010 Menno van der Sman, released under the MIT license