"Command failed with status ()" when precompiling assets

Question

I am having similiar problems like a lot of users when compiling assets on their productive box. The only difference is that I can't get any hint out of the trace to solve the problem. ``` rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production --trace ** Invoke assets:precompile (first_time) ** Execute assets:precompile /usr/local/rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p362/bin/ruby /usr/local/rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p362/bin/rake assets:precompile:all RAILS_ENV=production RAILS_GROUPS=assets --trace ** Invoke assets:precompile:all (first_time) ** Execute assets:precompile:all ** Invoke assets:precompile:primary (first_time) ** Invoke assets:environment (first_time) ** Execute assets:environment ** Invoke environment (first_time) ** Execute environment ** Invoke tmp:cache:clear (first_time) ** Execute tmp:cache:clear ** Execute assets:precompile:primary rake aborted! Command failed with status (): [/usr/local/rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p362/bin/r...] /usr/local/rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p362/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/file_utils.rb:5…

Accepted Answer

I am going to answer this myself because I could solve it more or less. If someone has additions, don't hesitate to write an own answer or comment this answer/question.

What I've found out so far:

If you play around with `assets:precompile` by e.g just compiling the primary assets (`assets:precompile:primary`) or explicitly calling `assets:precompile:all` you might end up with a hint about the source of your problem. In my case, I ran into `Errno::EACCES` on both `public/` and `tmp/`. Somehow that was not displayed, so make sure your user has full rights to create/delete files and folders there.

In my case, it worked sometimes because I've shut down the rails app and precompiled while it was down. Since precompiling allocates a lot of memory, I did some trial and error and eventually got the known `Killed` message when rake tries to execute `asstes:precompile:primary`. The task simply was killed because of using too much memory.

Another problem was that sprockets could not find `bootstrap` to put it into the assets pipeline on precompilation. Moving `gem 'bootstrap'` outside of `group :assets` solved this. This was also something I got hinted to when I played around with the commands.

The best way to solve – or better: work around – this problem is to simply compile your assets locally. Just throw a `rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=development` into your terminal and then deploy `public/assets`. Remember to delete that folder in your development environment after deploying it or you will end up debugging on why your changes on `app/assets/*` are not taking effect in development. At least that works for me(tm).

Alternatively, growing your swap partition may also work. However, compilation on a VPS where you need to use swap may take its while, so I'd stick to the local way.

"Command failed with status ()" when precompiling assets

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