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tenex / rails-assets

The solution to assets management in Rails
https://rails-assets.org
MIT License
1.63k stars 69 forks source link

Future of rails-assets #291

Closed jandudulski closed 8 years ago

jandudulski commented 8 years ago

Hi all,

as you probably know rails-assets.org is currently hosted thanks to courtesy of ShellyCloud team but unfortunately they will shut down on March 31, 2016. There are at least two topics to discuss:

There is obvious deadline - March 31, 2016. Before that day we have to find hosting platform which would like to become a new home for rails-assets. We are going to contact with most known hosting platforms and ask for support but if you already know any which could help us - please leave a message.

Future

rails-assets was born to fulfill some needs - we didn't want to manually build and maintain gems for vendor libraries with assets. However, world moved forward and there are a lot of solid solutions which allow to get rid of rubygems environment and separate backend and fronted libraries in rails projects.

The last nail in the coffin is current state of bower and generally speaking - community movement from bower to npm based solutions. If you are not aware - rails-assets functionality base on bower packages.

Our current plan and proposal is to migrate rails-assets in its current form to the new platform and support it until end of 2016. After that we would like to migrate existing packages to kind of ftp so existing projects could still bundle but it won't work for packages which has not yet been transformed.

We are open for any comments, help offer and proposals.

guizmaii commented 8 years ago

Hi @hut8,

Great initiative to host a copy but I can't proxify it in my Nexus because (I think) of your SSL configuration that is not so strong (see SslLabs results : https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=rails-assets.tenex.tech&hideResults=on). Can you improve it maybe ? Mozilla gives us a tool to help us config this well : https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generator/

I think that just replace your DH key for a 2048 bits one will improve your grade well.

guizmaii commented 8 years ago

@hut8 here some feedback : my build is blocked since 10 minutes to this step : Fetching version metadata from https://rails-assets.tenex.tech/

This is my use of your repo : 

source 'https://rails-assets.tenex.tech' do
  gem 'rails-assets-oncapslock'
end

:'(

richpeck commented 8 years ago

We've used rails-assets for over 1 year, it's the best solution of its kind.

What are you looking for to make it work? Money, bandwidth, server space, or all 3?

jandudulski commented 8 years ago

@jvanbaarsen

@jandudulski What are your main concerns at the moment?

Our main concern is that we're going to withdraw from using rails-assets and it is hard to maintain project which you're not using anymore. But we don't want to cut the project and leave developers unhappy with the situation so we're working on to find a new maintainer and I believe we would be able to announce some good news soon.

jvanbaarsen commented 8 years ago

@jandudulski Ok great! If needed, I can step up as well. Jus let me know :-)

hut8 commented 8 years ago

@guizmaii thank you so much for your feedback. I'm opening an issue on my clone of the repo and I'll have it fixed by the end of the day. I know that it's really slow at the moment; this is because I'm trying to build all the packages currently present on rails-assets.org. This is probably a bad idea, so I'm stopping it now.

bhgames commented 8 years ago

Hey guys, I just spent about 4 hours configuring Torba to work in place of Rails Assets. It's a pain in the ass to get setup because you have to find the right js file in each pulled repo to include instead of the nicer rails assets way, but it doesn't rely on any third party hosted service.

I think it's a good "drop-in" replacement, especially in that it carries NPM support, and all you need to do to add a new NPM module is drop it in, and then inspect your ~/.torba/new-npm-module-647433/ directory for the proper JS file to include. Normally this is in the dist folder but not all npm modules have them. It's kind of a mess over there in JS land.

Edit: Link to Torba https://github.com/torba-rb/torba

It also as of now has good Heroku documentation and support, though I haven't actually tried productionizing it yet. That's coming up next. Will report back if successful.

colbywhite commented 8 years ago

Our main concern is that we're going to withdraw from using rails-assets and it is hard to maintain project which you're not using anymore. ~ @jandudulski

If you don't mind me asking, if you're not using rails-assets, what are you using? A more direct back-end agnostic tool like gulp/browserify/etc.?

rbrigby commented 8 years ago

We at retail.gamegear.com use rails-assets in a new app we are building. We really do not want to migrate away from it if possible. It is by far the best solution for us.

teamon commented 8 years ago

Small update: we are setting up a mirror with @hut8, stay tuned :)

brooks commented 8 years ago

Can anyone confirm what date rails assets will be going away? The first post here says March 2016 but Im seeing end of 2016 on twitter, etc. Thanks :)

hut8 commented 8 years ago

Hi @brooks ! rails-assets is not going away. I know the thread is long, so I'll give you a TL;DR version.

The company that's hosting rails-assets (shellycloud) is shutting down in March. Monterail, the company that developed rails-assets, will make sure it is up till the end of 2016.

My consultancy, Tenex uses this and has forked it to https://github.com/tenex/rails-assets . As @teamon said 6 days ago, we have set up a mirror at https://rails-assets.tenex.tech . @joshjordan and I (of Tenex) have no plans of abandoning this.

So in summary, it will not be going away :smile:

brooks commented 8 years ago

Thanks @hut8 :smile:

mvastola commented 8 years ago

I'm sorry to hear rails-assets is planning to close its doors. Unfortunately, I can't comment much on what is being debated about the declining need for rails-assets (ostensibly due to the existence of better alternatives) as I don't really have experience with alternatives.. I -- as did, I imagine, many current users of this service -- went straight from manual asset management to rails-assets.

As such, could anyone be so kind as to lay out some of the many alternatives to rails-assets (alluded to by @jandudulski in his OP) providing both dependency management and rails asset pipeline integration while also highlighting any notable features or differences? (Perhaps such a summary would even be worth linking to from rails-assets.org?)

jvanbaarsen commented 8 years ago

@hut8 Will you be taking over the domain as well?

hut8 commented 8 years ago

Good question @jvanbaarsen . I've discussed this with @teamon and he said that if all goes well with our hosting of it, then yes, but it would be cool if he could confirm that :smiley:

Also, @mvastola , I wouldn't say it's shutting down for the reasons I gave a few hours before you made your post. It's simply that a different company is maintaining it. We've already made a few minor improvements, and have deployed it on DigitalOcean, who is sponsoring it as well.

I too would be interested in hearing the alternatives. After all, I would hate to waste my time contributing to something worthless :stuck_out_tongue: When rails-assets was down for a weekend, I did an enormous amount of research about this, and decided in the end of that rails-assets is definitely the best solution for a rails project who wants the frontend assets to "just work". I switched to bower-rails for a bit, and unfortunately still have it in one project, but it's caused me a ridiculous amount of maintenance headaches. For example, not only does it introduce more server-side dependencies during deployment, but it doesn't lock in versions, so I had deployed Angular 1.5 when angular-ui-select only works with <= 1.4.9 without a kludge (https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-select/issues/1325). So I can speak about the alternatives too, but can't say much without using expletives.

Probably a better solution for projects in general would be completely de-coupling the frontend from the backend, to the point where they could easily be in different git repositories. But that's definitely overkill for most use cases I've had. The lack of good alternatives for simple use cases is why I chose to pursue hosting and maintaining this excellent tool

shadowbq commented 8 years ago

Not worthless. Can we use this new mirror (https://rails-assets.tenex.tech) ? Can you post something about the domain itself, whether it will be temporary or a production mirror. Does bundler follow redirects if you take over the existing domain? Will you maintain this mirror on this domain for at least six months? [So in summary, it will not be going away] - The project/the domain or both? Thanks for stepping up.

marianoviola commented 8 years ago

@hut8 thank you for your commitment. May I suggest to add a donation button somewhere in the new website? I would be very happy to contribute with some money to the project.

Edit: Are you thinking to a monetisation strategy? I mean something to support private packages or some plans based on usage (bandwidth, number of packages and so on).

mensfeld commented 8 years ago

@hut8 please add a donation button. Rails assets are great for prototyping and testing! I will gladly donate this!

hut8 commented 8 years ago

@shadowbq Please do use the mirror! We will be supporting it for the foreseeable future. rails-assets.org does not currently point there, although at some point @teamon had mentioned to me via email that Monterail would be willing to transfer the domain if everything is stable with our mirror. It's on ShellyCloud till March, so I'm thinking that might be a good time to switch. We will continue using the https://rails-assets.tenex.tech domain indefinitely. If you find issues specific to our mirror, please file them in our fork (https://github.com/tenex/rails-assets)

@marianoviola @mensfeld Good suggestion!

Edit: @shadowbq -> https://github.com/bundler/bundler/blob/master/lib/bundler/fetcher/downloader.rb#L22 yes, redirects are followed :+1:

hut8 commented 8 years ago

@marianoviola @mensfeld Last night we added a donation button. See the top bar of https://rails-assets.tenex.tech

Again, thanks for the suggestion :+1:

mensfeld commented 8 years ago

@hut8 "You did not set a valid publishable key. Call Stripe.setPublishableKey() with your publishable key. For more info, see https://stripe.com/docs/stripe.js" :D

marianoviola commented 8 years ago

@hut8 great! You need to set a publishable key as suggested by @mensfeld :smile:

hut8 commented 8 years ago

Hey! This was actually a test for our MVP of the donation system. Now that we know that people actually will click on the button, we have implemented it :wink: It should be launched now. :rocket:

mensfeld commented 8 years ago

@hut8 works - you can check if the payment has been processed frm me ;)

lxsameer commented 8 years ago

rails-assets is one of my most important tools, I surely will miss it. Personally i don't like get my hands dirty with tools like bower or npm ( which is the worst piece of software i ever seen ). Managing front end dependencies using bundler is a brilliant idea. I think rails-assets can continue its work and I love to see this happen.

hut8 commented 8 years ago

Hey there @lxsameer . You don't need to miss it! I'm not sure if you read the entire thread since it's so long but rails-assets is definitely not going anywhere. It's sponsored by DigitalOcean, and myself and @joshjordan plan on supporting it indefinitely, certainly past the end of 2016. Feedback for our mirror at https://rails-assets.tenex.tech would be greatly appreciated.

lxsameer commented 8 years ago

@hut8 awesome. I'm very happy right now, Kudos to you guys.

colbywhite commented 8 years ago

Should this issue be closed with a recap comment? It appears that the new mirror will be the answer.

mensfeld commented 8 years ago

@colbywhite I believe this should be closed with a proper annotation about support option.

hut8 commented 8 years ago

@teamon Can you comment about the domain? Are you satisfied with Tenex taking things from here?

teamon commented 8 years ago

Sorry for the radio silence!

About the domain - yes, definitely. Plus I think we can close this thread now.

I've created another issue #312 to track what's left to be done before March 31.

assembler commented 8 years ago

You should probably add message on rails-assets.org that people should use rails-assets.tenex.tech instead and not having to read this huge thread :)

shadowbq commented 8 years ago

Please edit the issue to include updated information on the top of the big thread

MtnBiker commented 8 years ago

Another shout out for rails-assets. This worked today for this newbie. I hadn't been able to push to Heroku for a few weeks and decided I had to get it done. Read discussions about asset managers. Tried some things and decided to give rails-assets a go even though I may to make adjustments soon. It worked for me. Thanks and keep up the good work.

dt1973 commented 8 years ago

Used to have high hopes for https://github.com/half-pipe/half-pipe but I don't know what happened.

cc: @joefiorini

joefiorini commented 8 years ago

@dt1973 Thanks for the mention. I started the project but left the company where we were using it and went to a Python shop that obviously didn't have much need for it. I've also stopped using Grunt in favor of Webpack and other tools made for being a build solution. I'm happy to hand it off to someone if anyone wants to dust off the cobwebs and bring it into the modern age.

klippx commented 8 years ago

Webpack is the future boys

mockdeep commented 8 years ago

You know the future?!

halilim commented 8 years ago

The problem is, we haven't reached that future yet and we need a hassle-free asset management solution right now which doesn't change every six months :)

tibastral commented 8 years ago

And when you are back from the future you enjoy using rails-assets which is awesome :)

milushov commented 8 years ago

https://rails-assets.org/ is down? :( http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/rails-assets.org image

richpeck commented 8 years ago

Down for me too

Webpack looks good, similar to a lot of others like babel etc. Will be interesting to see if a single package manager is adopted

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 9:47 AM, Roma Milushov notifications@github.com wrote:

https://rails-assets.org/ is down? :( http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/rails-assets.org

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/rails-assets/rails-assets/issues/291#issuecomment-218095796

kofronpi commented 8 years ago

https://rails-assets.tenex.tech/ is down as well. Maybe they're doing the transfer they talked about ?

ssaunier commented 8 years ago

Or Maybe rails-assets.tenex.tech is suddenly being hit with a lots of requests!

If you have urgent deployments to do, you can vendor the gems:

bundle package

That way you'll have a vendor/cache folder created with every gem. You can commit / push that. Later on think of removing this commit (not just revert) as it grows your git repository a lot.

kofronpi commented 8 years ago

@ssaunier both URI point to the same server, see https://github.com/rails-assets/rails-assets/issues/329#issuecomment-218106608

sjauld commented 8 years ago

rails-assets.org is BACK!

joshjordan commented 8 years ago

@milushov @richpeck @kofronpi @ssaunier @sjauld thanks for the heads up. No transfer in progress - rails-assets.org is here to stay and shouldn't require any extra effort on your part. We weren't taking any more traffic than usual last night, and syslog isn't showing anything useful. Looks like we went hard down at 3:41AM. I'm following up with our hosting provider to get more info. Right now, we appear to be up and stable.