Unable to find entrypoint after deploying in staging.

[rachitpant]

Hello,
First i want to thank you for bringing the power of Vite to the rails community. Now the actual issue.

I migrated a moderately large rails/vue project from webpacker to vite. Its working perfectly fine locally. The problem happens when i try to deploy to staging environment using capistrano.
The one major difference between local and staging environment is that we have a base location ("/aasp") under which everthing is deployed.

Here is what i see in staging.log.
ActionView::Template::Error (Vite Ruby can't find entrypoints/application.js in ../../../../../manifest.json or ../../../../../manifest-assets.json.

However the manifest file is present in the public directory , and it does have an entry for the entrypoint application.js
Here is the structure of the deployment directory on the server.

Also here is part of the manifest file

{
  "entrypoints/application.js": {
    "file": "assets/application.b3572247.js",
    "src": "entrypoints/application.js",
    "isEntry": true,
    "imports": [
      "_vendor.9de18915.js"
    ],
    "dynamicImports": [
      "components/layout/Loading.vue",
      "components/layout/Header.vue",
      "components/layout/Nav.vue",
      "components/layout/Footer.vue",
      "pages/Home.vue",
      "pages/admin/GrantList.vue",

Here is the assets directory where the bundled assets/application.b3572247.js is present.

When I first got this error , I realized our Apache and passenger are configured so that assets live in a shared asset directory, so after deployment I moved all the assets that were originally present in public/assets directory , to the shared assets directory and made public/assets a symlink to the shared assets. This can be seen in the Fiilezilla screenshots above. All this also did not help. I just thought i should mention that.

Other than this, the publicOutputDir is "/" in vite.json

  "development": {
    "autoBuild": true,
    "publicOutputDir": "vite-dev",
    "port": 3036
  },
  "staging": {
    "publicOutputDir": "/"
  }
}

Also since the base URL is different in staging environment.
This is part of my vite.config.js

export default defineConfig({
  base: `"${process.env.routerBase}"`,
  plugins: [

and I added the folowing line to my deploy.rb file.
set :default_env, {VITE_RUBY_BASE: (ARGV[0] == "production" ? "/" : "/aasp") }

I know I am so close , especially since i got the "hard" parts working locally , like using VCurrencyField and vite with vue. However getting all this to work in staging is giving a real headache. Any help will be appreciated.

[ElMassimo]

Hi Rachit! @rachitpant

Regarding the first error, you will want to ensure that ViteRuby.config.manifest_path exists, which you can check manually by starting a console in the server.

From the error, it seems that the assets dir is outside the root of the Rails app, which is very unusual.

---

You should not configure base manually in Vite, instead use the base config option:

"base": "/aasp"

I'd advise not modifying publicOutputDir and keep the vite default. If you do, it should be "publicOutputDir": "" instead of containing a slash (not a valid dir name).

[ElMassimo]

The manifest path does not seem correct, probably because you are using "publicOutputDir": "/", which is not a valid config.

I'd avoid using VITE_RUBY_BASE, and instead set "base": "/aasp" for staging (if that's what you are using).

[rachitpant]

@ElMassimo Thank you for the quick help. I got the application running by making these changes and then deploying. I left the base url in vite.config.js , but removed it from the deploy script like you suggested , also corrected the publicOutputDir.

I had another minor problem related to favicon which i had commented out for now , but on uncommenting I am getting an error on the server.
The following in application.html.erb works fine locally
<%= favicon_link_tag vite_asset_path "images/favicon.ico" %>

However on the server i get an error.

F, [2022-03-21T13:26:57.076720 #6342] FATAL -- :   
ActionView::Template::Error (Vite Ruby can't find images/favicon.ico in public/manifest.json or public/manifest-assets.json.

[ElMassimo]

Check that ViteRuby.config.assets_manifest_path exists, and images/favicon.ico is in manifest-assets.json.

[rachitpant]

@ElMassimo For some reason there is no maniest.json or manifest-assets.json in the public directory although ViteRuby.config.assets_manifest_path does exist.

Loading staging environment (Rails 6.1.4.4)
2.7.2 :001 > ViteRuby.config.manifest_path
 => #<Pathname:/var/www/aasp/releases/20220321174332/public/manifest.json> 

The public directory on the server is an exact copy of the local public directory, plus an additional asset folder.

Just doesn't make any sense. Plus my happiness of getting the app to work in staging was short lived. I undid the changes related to getting the favicon to show , git forced , and now even after undoing all this , i can't get the application to run on staging.

[rachitpant]

Also wondering if the error continues to show because vite build never really happened. The only file that was changed ( and undid ) was application.html.erb , should that trigger a new build.

00:24 deploy:assets:precompile
    01 /usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm 2.7.2 do bundle exec rake assets:precompile
     01 Warning: NLS_LANG is not set. fallback to US7ASCII.
     01 npx: installed 1 in 1.541s
     01 yarn install v1.15.2
     01 [1/4] Resolving packages...
     01 success Already up-to-date.
     01 Done in 0.41s.
     01 Skipping vite build. Watched files have not changed since the last build at 2022-03-21 13:23:34
     01 yarn install v1.15.2
     01 [1/4] Resolving packages...
     01 success Already up-to-date.
     01 Done in 0.41s.

[rachitpant]

@ElMassimo I ran RAILS_ENV=staging bin/rake vite:clobber and then triggered a rebuild and now everything is working fine again.

There are two things that seem like an issue to me during deployment :

1. If the rails assets directory is an existing symlink , the vite build is not placing the assets in the actual location , but instead its recreating an assets folder and placing assets there.
2. The actual content of the public directory ( in addition to assets ) is either the manifest files ( manifest.json and manifest-assets.json ) or the rails application public folder content. I am not sure when one happens vs the other , but i have never been able to get both the orignal public directory contents and manifest files within the public directory of the server deployment.