Heroku is cool, but it took me forever to figure out why it wasn’t serving my css and images. It was basically returning 404 for any file in the public directory.

I just got errors like this:


ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/javascripts/base_packaged.js" with {:method=>:get, :canvas=>false}):
/home/heroku_rack/lib/static_assets.rb:9:in `call'


Given that the app that I’m trying on Heroku is also running perfectly well in production on slicehost, this was pretty confusing.

After thinking it through and looking at Rack::Static, I updated my config.ru (the rackup file) according to lifo’s instructions here, and suddenly everything worked. I then intentionally changed it back and verified that this was indeed the issue.

I changed it from this:

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# Doesn't work with heroku

# Require your environment file to bootstrap Rails
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/config/environment'

# Dispatch the request
run ActionController::Dispatcher.new

to this:

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# works with heroku

require "config/environment"

use Rails::Rack::LogTailer
use Rails::Rack::Static
run ActionController::Dispatcher.new

Hopefully this helps someone else.