Assetic

Loading assets from a different server

Christian Scheb

In a production environment you’ll eventually want to load assets (images, CSS and JS) from a different server. Perhaps you’re running your own asset server or you’re even using a CDN. This will require the files to be linked with an absolute URL. But in your development environment you don’t want this – you want assets to be loaded directly from the same server.

So this is what you do. Use Symfony’s asset() function for every asset you want to load from the asset server:

If you’re using Assetic you’ll have to add the asset() function to asset_url:

{% javascripts '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/*' %}
    
{% endjavascripts %}

Now you can have different configuration for your production and development environment:

framework:
  templating:
    engines: ['twig']
    assets_base_urls: http://assets.yourdomain.com

framework:
  templating:
    assets_base_urls: ~ # Files are loaded with relative path

Some hints when Assetic is not compiling

Christian Scheb

We’re sometimes having the problem that Assetic is not compiling for some reason. It tries to compile files, which are actually not referenced anywhere in the project. This especially happens when switching branches while an Assetic dump is running in the background (with watch option enabled).

Here are the steps we usually do to get the problem fixed:

1) Restart Assetic dumper
Ok, that one is obvious. Restart the Assetic dumper to refresh its information. Just like a reboot of Windows 😉

2) Clear cache
Sometimes there is wrong information in the cache directory of the dev environment. Delete the whole app/cache/dev directory to get a clean new build. Then restart the Assetic dumper.

3) Take a look at the temp directory
Assetic writes some files to the temporary directory of your operating system. Search for files named assetic_* .  and delete them. Then restart the Assetic dumper.

Hope this helps!