Switch to dartsass-rails and foreman, ./bin/dev

[nimmolo]

This is the standard SASS compiler people use. Our current gem dartsass-sprockets is sort of a retrofit that allows us to keep building assets with sprockets-rails. dartsass-rails seems to be better maintained though, and unlike dartsass-sprockets it has an option that silences our many Bootstrap-3-related SASS deprecation warnings in CI.

It builds assets using the gem foreman, which it automatically installs. Switching to this gem unblocks us from retiring sprockets and switching to propshaft if we want to.

Important

Developers need to change the way we start the local server

First, gem install foreman — devs must install locally, but I believe it will install automatically. The docs say it should not be bundled in the Gemfile, and explains why.

Then whenever you want to start the dev server, instead of rails s, you run ./bin/dev. That's it.

Explanation: ./bin/dev is a script that runs rails s and starts foreman. Unlike dartsass-sprockets, dartsass-rails does not automatically watch our assets/stylesheets folders for changes. The "watching" is performed by foreman.

Note

In our .github/ci_rails.yml, I've added this to build the Sass files before running any tests that interact with the browser:

bundle exec rails dartsass:build

It turns out though that foreman may be also useful for running a solid_queue server; specifically if it can stop and start the server on code changes. @mo-nathan and I are finding that solid queue is very finicky about changed code and requires a lot of restarting in dev. I believe we can add a proc to foreman's config so that it will restart solid queue. (We need to confirm that it can detect code changes that are relevant to solid queue, see this post.)

[coveralls]

coverage: 94.335% (-0.05%) from 94.388%
when pulling 0bdf73e on nimmo-dartsass-rails
into 7c0ca66 on main.

[nimmolo]

@mo-nathan This may clear up the finicky solid queue situation in dev. We could try it either before or after the field slips PR.

In either case, we should add this to Procfile.dev before testing out how well it deals with starting SQ.

solidqueueworker: bundle exec rake solid_queue:start