Ruby on Rails stylesheet rendering files and application.css with common css

Question

I'm wondering what application.css is for? If I'm creating a new file for header and footer so all my pages can just include header and footer page, do I just put all common css syntax in application.css ? or should I just create a new custom.css and place all the syntax that is going to be used throughout my application like body, html, ul, a, tags and stuff?

Thanks

Answer 1

What is application.css for? Have you read the Rails guide on the Asset Pipeline ? That page alone answers your "what's it for?" question and more very clearly and thoroughly.

As for placement of your styling, the guide mentions:

The default matcher for compiling files includes application.js, application.css and all non-JS/CSS files (ie, .coffee and .scss files are not automatically included as they compile to JS/CSS):

This means by default Rails is only going to compile an application.css file for you. Sure, you can put your styling in app/assets/stylesheets/custom.css and include it with

/**
 *= require custom 
 */

but your "custom" styling sounds like application styling, so it seems it'd be best to just drop it all into application.css and let Rails do what it does by default.