Dieter Komendera

Embed Images and Fonts Into CSS with the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline

We're using documentcloud's Jammit for managing CSS and Javascript dependencies, concatenation and as a bonus, also embedding certain images and fonds directly into the CSS file to improve page load times.

Now that Rails 3.1 is on the horizon with it's brand new asset pipeline, based on sprockets, we chose it as our new solution to manage assets. The only drawback: Sprockets doesn't have built-in support for embedding assets like we did with Jammit.

Enter the embed-assets-rails gem.

Fortunately, it's straight-forward to extend the asset pipeline and add features to it. And this is what the gem is about. We've integrated Jammit's embed assets feature to work nicely with Rails 3.1!

Source is on Github, of course. Thoughts and contribution are welcome.