Rails does not serve application.css.erb

Question

Trying out Rails 8 for the first time. The Rails guide states:

The asset pipeline automatically evaluates ERB. This means if you add an erb extension to a CSS asset (for example, application.css.erb), then helpers like asset_path are available in your CSS rules:

.class { background-image: url(<%= asset_path 'image.png' %>) }

I need this to render fingerprinted assets.

But once I rename my application.css to application.css.erb, the stylesheet stops being served to my browser altogether.

As a workaround, I’ve tried keeping application.css (no .erb) and turning fingerprinting off per the guide, but that doesn’t work either: image paths are still fingerprinted.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

As max pointed out, Propshaft handles asset paths automatically. There’s no need for css.erb. From the docs:

Propshaft will automatically convert asset references in CSS to use the digested file names. So background: url("/bg/pattern.svg") is converted to background: url("/assets/bg/pattern-2169cbef.svg") before the stylesheet is served.