administrate: sassc dependency breaks compatibility with tailwindcss-rails

What I did for some projects which still depend on Sass was creating my own compressor, which skips the SassC compression if it fails.

class SkippingSassCompressor
  def compress(string)
    options = { syntax: :scss, cache: false, read_cache: false, style: :compressed}
    begin
      Sprockets::Autoload::SassC::Engine.new(string, options).render
    rescue => e
      puts "Could not compress '#{string[0..65]}'...: #{e.message}, skipping compression"
      string
    end
  end
end

Since the skipped (tailwind) files, are not compressed this way, I just added the --minify option to the tailwindcssCLI to compress them as well.

"build:css": "tailwindcss -i ./app/assets/stylesheets/home.tailwind.css -o ./app/assets/builds/home.css --minify"

I did not test this especially with administrate, but have this working on multiple projects where we want to slowly migrate to tailwind.

Thank you all for your solutions to this, it’s been a headache! You solution @sedubois worked for me, thank you for sharing it. I just dropped Rails.application.config.assets.css_compressor = nil in config/initializers/assets.rb and it worked.

Actually, it looks like we managed to continue to use administrate, even with its dependency on the old sassc-rails, while the rest of our app changes to cssbundling-rails with Dart Sass (for our legacy views) and Tailwind (for new views). The key for us was to ensure config.assets.css_compressor was set to nil for all Rails environments. Without this we encountered errors such as ActionView::Template::Error: Error: Function rgb is missing argument $green and I think also errors of the type ActionView::Template::Error: Asset X was not declared to be precompiled in production. So far we haven’t needed to use one of the administrate forks suggested in this PR. Also see https://github.com/rails/cssbundling-rails/pull/129.

The solution is pretty simple: we need to get rid of all JS/CSS dependencies and just mention how to add them in the README.

We must let developers choose the way they handle their assets, whether it’s using sassc, webpack or importmap.

Maybe we can add some generator rails g administrate js:importmap or something like that.

Unfortunately, this may not be simple at all. Before Rails 7, there were two main ways of handling assets: Webpacker and Sprockets. We have tried to make Administrate work with both, but it’s difficult work and complex to reproduce issues.

Now Rails 7 has arrived with yet another way to do things. We’ll have to spend the time to make it work there too, and we would rather that Administrate kept working with previous versions of Rails (at the moment we support Rails 5+).

I haven’t used Rails 7 yet and I haven’t really read much about how the new way to work with assets is. I will have to eventually, but right now I’m a bit short of time so I don’t know when I’ll get to sit down and figure this out 😕

Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be us maintainers who do this work. One of you may be able to volunteer and offer a first stab at the solution. It doesn’t need to be a complete PR: an initial prototype could help communicate what exactly needs to happen, and to start testing if there are issues with back compatibility.

Any takers? 😃

Thank you all for your solutions to this. Your solution @kaka-ruto @sedubois Thank You. I just dropped Rails.application.config.assets.css_compressor = nil in config/initializers/assets.rb and it worked.

I would love it if there was official support for this. Is there anyway we can get this merged (maybe as a major version bump)?

I also tried various forks and solutions mentioned on this issue page. Nothing worked. I created a fork myself https://github.com/oroth8/administrate and it works perfectly with my rails 7 tailwind configured app.

@pablobm Here is my PR https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/2116 I hope you like that solution.

Neither of the forks above worked for me (because I think administrate has pushed new commits after those forks were made). So I created a new up-to-date fork here: https://github.com/materialsnow/administrate

You can run rails assets:precompile locally in the app that is leveraging Administrate to make sure that step will work during your build. Just fix any errors (like adding the assets to manifest.js) and you should be good to go.

It works for me as of this posting. I’m using Rails 7.0.4. Best of luck!

Moving to dartsass-rails will fix this issue, i currently got it working with dartsass, i had to generate the administrate gem stylesheets in my project here is a link to my fork with dart-sass fork works with tailwind

i just updated the branch, now you dont need to generate the assets in your project

@dvruette

I’ve been running into the same issue and the PR by @n-studio seems to fix it, thank you so much!

As a hotfix for anyone else running into this, I’ve added the branch with the fix to the Gemfile like so:

gem "administrate", github: "n-studio/administrate", branch: "compile-assets"

This is a completely valid fix - but it will break if @n-studio deletes that particular branch in the future. And, it’s a development branch - not main - so it’s not reasonable to expect it to stick around. So, please fork the code to your own Github if you want to follow this approach! (and replace github: "n-studio/administrate" with your own fork)

@n-studio - I would consider it. If you create a PR so that I can see what it looks like, it can help me understand.

@pablobm I have a fork compatible with Rails 7, I’ll try to make it retrocompatible and submit a PR this weekend. Are you ok with the idea of adding generators to add assets in the Rails app? This would be a breaking change but the upgrade would be easy and straightforward.