Rails - Can I run rake assets:precompile on production server, while the production app is still running?

Question

Sorry if this question sounds basic. But I haven't been able to find an answer anywhere on the web...

I'm currently running my Rails app on a Ubuntu server. Until now I've always shut down the production app before I pull the changes, run rake assets:clean assets:precompile, and only boot up the Rails app again once the process is finished.

I'm not sure whether the shutting down of app is necessary(i.e. if I don't do it, my app will behave erratically). It induces about 5 minutes of down time.

If that's a must, then maybe I should try to do local precompilation/more advanced deployment procedure, in order to reduce downtime? (Tried local compilation according to http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#local-precompilation, but then after deleting original public/assets and pulling locally precompiled public/assets from the repo, the production server was having rack timeout all the time and won't render anything.)

Answer 1

YES you run rake assets:precompile Rails looks through your assets folder and copies over everything that is not Javascript or CSS into public/assets. It then creates application.js by reading app\assets\javascripts\application.js, and application.css by reading app\assets\stylesheets\application.css, loading up all the "require" files it finds in there. So yes..you can do it ..but if you ran rake assets:clean..and then precompile...then public/assets will be updated with new compiled assets.

Dont forget to restart the server :)