I’m currently upgrading one of the Ruby on Rails apps from Rails 3.0 to Rails 3.1. As it so happens we’re using ActiveAdmin with it which requires sass-rails on Rails 3.1. At the time of writing the latest version of sass-rails is 3.1.5 and it requires the asset pipeline to be enabled. But I don’t want to upgrade from jammit at this time so I have to disable the asset pipeline. But with the asset pipeline disabled the app can’t start due to sass-rails. So here’s what I needed to do to make it work.

config/environment.rb

I had to change it so that it looks like the code snippet below. Basically this fakes the asset pipeline for the benefit of sass-rails.

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# Load the rails application
require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__)

Webanalyzer::Application.assets = Struct.new(:context_class) do
  def append_path(*args); end
end.new(Class.new)

# Initialize the rails application
Webanalyzer::Application.initialize!

config/application.rb

Disable compilation of the assets alongside disabling the asset pipeline as a whole.

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config.assets.enabled = false
config.assets.compile = false

Done!

The two small changes fixed sass-rails without the asset pipeline for now. Hopefully pull request #84 will be merged into sass-rails soon and a new version will be released so that this hack won’t be necessary. Until then this is the most basic fix I could come up with.