Asset path helpers about gulp-rails-pipeline

[lneffa]

@rymohr thanks for the links, I have a question about using ActionView helpers...
How can I have Gulp tasks build up assets and dump them into ./public/assets while being able to use helpers? I have, for example with html files, been using gulp-ruby-haml which allows me to use Ruby, but no helper methods are accessible.. Would love to be able to precompile html locally and in the preprocessing be able to use helpers.

Am I going in the right direction?

[rymohr]

Sorry @audeamus22 I haven't actually started using this library yet. Maybe @greypants can help.

[lneffa]

Ok thank you, any suggestions @greypants ?

[greypants]

Hmm... I guess it could make sense to just add gulp/assets as the first directory searched, then fallback to the old asset pipeline directories (`app/assets, 'vendor/assets', etc). I'll definitely look into it (or feel free to open a pull request)

@audeamus22 Not sure about gulp-ruby-haml - this setup continues to use Rails views for markup, and the gulp_asset_path helper is available to them, and you can use that with regular html for now.

haml

%img{src => gulp_asset_path('images/foo.png')}

erb

<img src="<%= gulp_asset_path('images/foo.png') %>" >

[lneffa]

Thank you @greypants, I have gotten the gulp_asset_path working great when implemented through Rails views markup. I am presented with the following challenge and can't seem to figure it out:

I am using a client framework (Auriela / Durandal to be specific). This framework has not supported the use of javascript function templates that can be accessed and re-used client side. Also, this framework uses module ids to fetch from the server specific html files, such as:
/assets/javascripts/common/main_nav/main_nav.html
Aurelia / Durandal expects an html file response.

Knowing how there are gems to output js templates ( such as this one: https://github.com/dnagir/ruby-haml-js ), the ability to use these gems to configure the assets:precompile build works. These configurations allow for the client to tap into whatever logic Rails and the ActionView helpers can provide --- all through a global JST function spit out by the gem. link_to, form_for, gulp_asset_path all can work inside these *.jst.hamljs files.

I'm looking for a way to take your gulp task setup and modify it so I can tap into link_to, form_for, gulp_asset_path, and be able to generate html files that are dumped to ./public/assets/javascripts/**/*.html. Or alternatively, if it is not possible to run a gulp task to do this, is there a way to get Rails to serve these .html files back on getting requests from Aurelia / Durandal? And if Rails is able to serve these .html files, does that mean I would have to set config.assets.compile = true in production.rb config?

I really appreciate your help, thank you.

[rymohr]

@greypants was going to open a PR but wanted to make sure I didn't break anything. Did I miss something or is there no test suite?

[greypants]

Wild west. No test suite yet. 😨

I'll open an issue to add one.